茄子直播

鈥淚 think by being more open about our research we can all learn how to do the experiments better,鈥 Harding says (photo by Melissa Hooper)

Huntington's disease: University of Toronto researcher is first to share lab notes in real time

鈥淭his should drive the process faster than working alone,鈥 Rachel Harding says

Faculty of Medicine researcher Rachel Harding will be the first known biomedical researcher to welcome the world to review her lab notes in real time.

The post-doctoral fellow with 茄子直播鈥檚 Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is also explaining her findings to the general public through her blog. She hopes her open approach will accelerate research into Huntington鈥檚 disease. 

鈥淭his should drive the process faster than working alone,鈥 Harding says. 鈥淏y sharing my notes, I hope that other scientists will critique my work, collaborate and share data in the early stages of research.鈥

Harding's research at SGC is funded by CHDI Foundation, a non-profit drug-development organization exclusively dedicated to Huntington鈥檚 disease. Both organizations aim to accelerate research by making it open and collaborative. 

Her approach is intended to leverage the experience of a community of scientists. Individual researchers often still work in relative isolation and then publish only their positive discoveries, usually years after the experiments were actually done. The result? Scientists often pursue similar ideas in parallel and miss many opportunities to learn from each other鈥檚 mistakes. 

She has started by publishing raw data and play-by-play details of her first effort on . She also posts regular updates on her blog Lab Scribbles, where she includes an experimental summary written in lay terms.

Harding hopes this will speed up research into Huntington鈥檚 disease, which despite decades of effort researchers have yet to uncover the mechanisms behind the neurodegenerative disorder. It鈥檚 known that a mutation in the huntingtin gene leads to progressive cognitive decline and physical deterioration, usually beginning between the ages of 35 and 50. But, the exact structure of the huntingtin protein encoded by this gene remains a mystery. Understanding what the protein looks like will give insight into how it causes disease and potentially reveal ways of reducing its harm.

鈥淭his is a very large protein and difficult to study. It is significantly larger than most other proteins in the cell,鈥 says Harding. It also has an especially complicated structure with few similarities to other known proteins, which makes learning by comparison more difficult. 

Considering the challenges and the high stakes, Harding will take all the help she can get. She hopes that by opening her notebook to the research community, she will open new channels of communication and collaboration. She also invites people who aren鈥檛 necessarily scientists, including patient communities, to get involved in the process.

鈥淭his is what research is really like,鈥 says Harding. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not so much about big breakthroughs and polished results, but about incrementally getting closer to an answer. I think by being more open about our research we can all learn how to do the experiments better.鈥 

This same community-based philosophy underlies CHDI鈥檚 drive to be a 鈥渃ollaborative enabler,鈥 bringing scientists from diverse disciplines together and sharing resources and expertise to advance Huntington鈥檚 disease research. It鈥檚 also why the SGC provides open access to an array of data and reagents 鈥 from chemical probes that enable drug discovery in cancer research to raw data on huntingtin.

鈥淏y providing access to raw data as well as the enabling research tools, we will help the community perform more robust experiments, which will accelerate the drug discovery process and potentially the development of new medicines,鈥 says Aled Edwards, a professor in 茄子直播's department of medical biophysics and director and CEO of the SGC.  

Harding announced she was opening her lab notes to the public at CHDI鈥檚 11th Annual HD Therapeutics Conference, which was held this week.

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