Biology Research, YouTube Style

Nature is reporting the emergence of a fledgling online journal launched this month consisting "entirely of videos of scientists performing basic molecular-biology protocols." The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), described in detail at the Biohacking blog, was inspired by its creator's inability to successfully reproduce published results in studies concerning how well different yeast strains invade the medium on which they are growing. Cemile Guldal, a graduate student at Princeton, later "realized that her troubles stemmed from a basic misunderstanding about how the experiment was performed — she had been scrubbing the surface yeast cells from her medium, instead of simply washing it under running water." She hopes JoVE will help other researchers avoid this issue by increasing the reproducibility of published results.

Instructional videos on JoVE in its first month range from starting culture from frozen human ES, to performing light/dark transition tests for mice. The site is also seeking inclusion in the PubMed directory.

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