Improving communication for interdisciplinary teams working on storage of digital information in DNA.
Improving communication for interdisciplinary teams working on storage of digital information in DNA.
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DOI：
10.12688/f1000research.13482.1
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Goldman N
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Hesketh EE;Sayir J;Goldman N
来自不同背景、在不同科学领域工作的专家之间的密切合作是克服生物学、化学、物理和工程学交叉领域挑战的有效策略。这种合作中的沟通本身就具有挑战性。 即使项目成功完成，最终的出版物（必然是多人撰写的）也有可能脱节。无论是在现场还是在场外，很少有人能够完全理解这项工作的整体。需要解决这个问题，以促进高效工作、同行评审、可及性和对更多受众的影响。我们是一支跨学科团队，致力于新兴科学领域，即重新利用 DNA 作为数字信息的存储介质。在本说明中，我们强调了此类合作中出现的一些困难，并概述了我们通过词汇表和受控词汇以及通过简短的通俗语言摘要来改善沟通所做出的努力。我们希望激发这个新兴领域的早期讨论，讨论我们的社区如何改进我们工作的描述和呈现，以促进研究小组内部和研究小组之间的清晰沟通，并增加那些不熟悉我们各自领域的人的可及性——无论是分子生物学、计算机科学、信息论还是未来可能变得相关的其他领域。为了实现开放和包容性的讨论，我们创建了一个术语表和受控词汇表作为基于云的共享文档，并邀请其他科学家批评我们的建议并贡献自己的想法。
Close collaboration between specialists from diverse backgrounds and working in different scientific domains is an effective strategy to overcome challenges in areas that interface between biology, chemistry, physics and engineering. Communication in such collaborations can itself be challenging. Even when projects are successfully concluded, resulting publications — necessarily multi-authored — have the potential to be disjointed. Few, both in the field and outside, may be able to fully understand the work as a whole. This needs to be addressed to facilitate efficient working, peer review, accessibility and impact to larger audiences. We are an interdisciplinary team working in a nascent scientific area, the repurposing of DNA as a storage medium for digital information. In this note, we highlight some of the difficulties that arise from such collaborations and outline our efforts to improve communication through a glossary and a controlled vocabulary and accessibility via short plain-language summaries. We hope to stimulate early discussion within this emerging field of how our community might improve the description and presentation of our work to facilitate clear communication within and between research groups and increase accessibility to those not familiar with our respective fields — be it molecular biology, computer science, information theory or others that might become relevant in future. To enable an open and inclusive discussion we have created a glossary and controlled vocabulary as a cloud-based shared document and we invite other scientists to critique our suggestions and contribute their own ideas.