Positive about negative findings
Negative results are a critical but often overlooked part of the research ecosystem. At Cultivarium, we make it a point to share both what does and doesn’t work.
The not-so-secret rule of thumb in biology is that most experiments are very (very) likely to initially fail. Effectively, this means that the vast majority of research yields a marginal amount of positive results. This is especially true in the field of non-model organisms, where there are few prior publications available to help guide the research.
For a mathematician or a physicist, this degree of inherent failure and uncertainty is mind boggling (try describing your last cloning experiment to a physicist, probabilities and all).
For a biologist, this is just another day in the lab.
One would think that in a field so prone to failure, life scientists would find a way to collectively leverage negative data. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As recently highlighted in Nature, negative results are a critical but often overlooked part of the research ecosystem. An immense amount of resources (as much as $28 billion USD per year) are wasted due to low reproducibility of research findings, slowing down scientific progress. In the best-case scenario, negative results are painstakingly collected from publications. More often, they simply don’t make the cut.
At Cultivarium, we know that every day counts when working with non-model microbes— so we make it a point to share negative results. We share what we learn about what doesn’t work so you don’t have to try it yourself, saving precious time and money. We also learn from our own failures, and use negative results to iteratively improve the tools we develop.
For each organism we bring into our lab, we carefully document and publish all our findings onto the Portal. This includes culture media with no detected growth, plasmids that fail to replicate, and promoters that do not… promote. The Portal offers the flexibility to include or exclude negative results in view, depending on the user’s needs. Leading by example, we hope our Portal can catalyze community effort to share and learn from negative results.
