A collection of resources related to citizen science in microbiology
What is Citizen Science?
“Citizen Science” usually refers to science that is conducted with the active participation of non-scientists. For example a citizen science microbiology project might ask people around the country to sample their air filters and send them to a lab for microbial analysis. The results of this analysis would be shared with the participants, thereby benefiting both science as well as public outreach/education. Citizen science shouldn’t be confused with “crowdsourcing” (e.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk). Another related, but distinct activity is DIY Biology in which non-scientists directly conduct scientific research.
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Two high school students contacted me to ask how they could document the microbes in their classroom, citing concerns about an unusual number of students in their class getting sick. Does microBEnet have a K-12 or citizen science component that these students could participate in?
William,
microBEnet doesn’t have anything like what you’re describing. Couple of links that might be useful are SciStarter which is a collection of available citizen science projects:
http://scistarter.com/
More possibly relevant is uBiome which is a company that will sequence microbes from a sample:
http://ubiome.com/