1. Purpose

The purpose is to develop a prototype showing how it is possible to deliver a scalable tool that creates ways to interact with data from biological experiments and create simple visualizations using the data from the Rodent Research Reference Mission-1 (OSD-379) and Rodent Research-23 Mission (OSD-665). The project aims at university-grade students and researchers that are searching for experiment data and need fast insights to develop new research. Therefore, the solution was developed with the intent to provide ways to explore the data in an easy way.

Be aware that our current solution is adapted to OSD-379 and OSD-665 datasets and may correctly display the working functions intended for our product. Note that it also reads all datasets from the Open Data Source from NASA, except that some functionalities may not work as intended since each dataset has some peculiar information.

2. Background

Currently, biological experiments datas are available in NASA and is valuable if a broader audience and scientists can use it. Today, the available access to that information is a web site and API endpoints that an user may face some difficulty to get insights and browse through all the experiements. For that, an interested individual need to connect or download the data even to make simples statistics as means, maximuns and medians. Therefore, such interaction with the data may delay or difficult students and beginning researches to understand how to use the results openly available.

The experiments dataset from OSD-379 and OSD-665 are important research results from ISS experiments and are used in this challenge and sollution to show how the solution works.

3. Target Audience

The developed sollution focus on university students and start level researchers that are thrilling to find new conclusions on biological experiments and develop new researches. Thus, the public would benefit if the tool helps to browse through the different experiments and take conclusions in a fast manner.

Our persona would be:

18 to 25 years old student or researcher.
Not very experienced with experimental data and assays.
Is trying to locate relevant data to develp new insights and use it in yout projects.
May not have sophisticated tools or need to have charts and statistics in a fast way.

4. Approach

As a team we clarified all the objectives of the problem and made clear that everyone had a basic understanding. Than, we broke the problem in why, how, what and sketched some deliverables. Followin, with some brainstorm session we started to get a sollution design and splitted the activities with the team.

The data analysis to feed the solution desing used python to get some insights about the available data, we used Miro to share all the informations concerning the project, canvas to design the frontend look and web design with Angular to deliver the final solution.

The first screen is a search to access different experiments results by its experiment identificator, organism, tissue and other terms that maybe searched. The toll will bring experiments related to search input in a dropdown selection menu.

upload_image.22:10:34.263081

In the next screen, the user can understand the solution innovation by clicking in the generative AI review button that brings a vey short and clear explanation of all the information about the main descriptions of the experiment. Saving time of the audience and helping beginners with a more simple communication.

upload_image.21:34:29.698729

We opted to a simple approach and tried to keep a clean view in order to facilitate for the users. The following screen after selecting an experiment shows details of the data and display important insights such as what is the average of quality assurance of the assays. In the same screen, the student can make fast checks on the data by choosing different columns of the results to have a table and simply display of charts that help better understanding of the results.

In addtion, to get more details of the experiments, with no assistance of other tool the user can select some specific columns of the experiment data to display. In a future development it also will deliver simple charts according with the selected columns (currently, a dummy sample chart is displayed).

upload_image.21:34:56.953829

With this easy way of access, we are confident the experiments will be more accessible and light more interest to the next generation of researches.

2024 NASA Space Apps Challenge

Galatics Rats