Sarah Richardson

Precise information about prokaryotic husbandry is currently the sorry preserve of oral history and undigitized literature. We built a crowd-sourceable strain manipulation, relation, and cultivation database (SMRC). This exhaustive interrogation of phenotype—a type of search available nowhere else—should become the standard by which all microbe characterization is measured. In this iPhone age, if your software doesn’t have a pretty, flexible interface, nobody will use it, let alone make it a crowdsourced powerhouse. This catalyst grant gives us a way to provide a user interface that will get the ball rolling on adoption and data collection.