It’s the first day of the ACS meeting in a bakingly hot Washington DC, so I decided to dip my toes into the cool waters of chemoinformatics. One of my favourite talks was by Jean-Claude Bradley, who provided an update on his work using open notebooks. Jean-Claude points out that one of the advantages of Open Data is the way that it allows quick validation of results – because there’s no filtering of the data, then it’s easy for anyone to scrutinize any unusual observations. What’s more, if your data disagree with someone else’s, then it’s possible to work out what might have been done differently, potentially leading to useful new discoveries along the way.

I also quite liked his use of crowdsourcing as a way of amassing lots of data. He’s currently interested in accumulating solubility data, so he’s found some nice ways of getting people around the world to help provide it. For example, one undergraduate lab asks its students to generate solubility data as a practical assignment; the data is then passed on to Jean-Claude’s group for his project. What better way to motivate students in their practical work than by giving them an assignment that generates useful new information?

So I came away from the session thinking anew about the whole Open Data concept. What do you think about it?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

On my way up to Glasgow from London I did a spot of sailing. On the trip from Fleetwood, Lancashire, to Whitehaven, Cumbria, for a long time we could see the nuclear fuel plant Sellafield. It spans a vast area of the Cumbrian coast line.

So it was with interest that I spotted a poster by PhD student Sarah Wallace from Leeds University in the UK.

She has been looking at how strontium, a waste product from Sellafield, will move in the sediment near the plant, and if it might make it into the groundwater.

The contaminant plumes from the plant tend to have a high pH, and what Wallace had found so far is that in these conditions strontium-90 likes to stick to sediment. This could actually be good news for Sellafield because the half life of strontium-90 is such that as long as it sticks to the ground it will have decayed within 300 years or so.

Strontium is potentially nasty because it’s in the same chemical group as calcium, a major bone component. So if strontium gets into the water and into the body, it can compete with calcium in the bones and cause diseases such as leukemia.

Wallace’s work involved a fake contaminated bit of land – taking normal soil and untouched groundwater from the area and spiking it. In future she hopes to see what the longer term effects of strontium-90 are.