As Andrew previously alluded, Mark2Curators will be marking genes and drugs in addition to diseases in the next campaign for NLGY1. This has created all sorts of challenges which we’ve needed to address (actually, Max already incorporated the ability to do multiple annotation types from the get-go, but we didn’t have a chance to test how users would react to it). Fortunately, we have strong support from local Mark2Curators who have been eager to sort out our user experience issues, and our tutorials are currently being built.

In the NGLY1 campaign, Mark2curators will be able to use multiple colors to denote different annotation types which will be introduced in our new set of tutorials.

Mark2Curators have been a great inspiration to us, so we’re incorporating diseases of interest to our beta contributors into the tutorials and/or practice modules. Our next campaign is to help researchers find cures for NGLY1, but that doesn’t mean we will ignore the diseases our contributors are fighting against. By incorporating these diseases into our tutorials and/or practice modules, we hope to help raise awareness for those diseases.

So far, we’ve heard from our contributors about cystic fibrosis, Hashimoto’s encephalopathy, ALPS, Alzheimer Disease, Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy, Sarcoma, Arnold Chiari Type I, Leukemia, pancreatic cancer, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, Achalasia, Gaucher disease, and type I diabetes. We’ve woven a few of these into the next set of tutorials and hope to incorporate more of them into the additional practice modules.

Contributed to our beta experiment and want to sneak your disease into the next campaign? Contact us (email ‘contact at mark2cure dot org’)! Want to your disease area to be the focus of Mark2Cure’s next campaign? Join our mailing list and be amongst the first notified of when we launch. The interests, input, and contributions of our users play an important role in directing where we go next with Mark2Cure.