Expanding the Immunology Toolbox: Embracing Public-Data Reuse and Crowdsourcing

Abstract

New technologies have been propelling dramatic increases in the volume and diversity of large-scale public data, which can potentially be reused to answer questions beyond those originally envisioned. However, this often requires computational and statistical skills beyond the reach of most bench scientists. The development of educational and accessible computational tools is thus critical, as are crowdsourcing efforts that utilize the community's expertise to curate public data for hypothesis generation and testing. Here we review the history of public-data reuse and argue for greater incorporation of computational and statistical sciences into the biomedical education curriculum and the development of biologist-friendly crowdsourcing tools. Finally, we provide a resource list for the reuse of public data and highlight an illustrative crowdsourcing exercise to explore public gene-expression data of human autoimmune diseases and corresponding mouse models. Through education, tool development, and community engagement, immunologists will be poised to transform public data into biological insights.