Here's a reminder for our second SciFoo Lives On session in Second Life tomorrow Monday August 27, 2007 16:00 GMT/12:00 ET. Berci and I will be the moderators. I've put up a one page poster to briefly discuss our drug development efforts with our collaborators using Web 2.0 tools. Everyone is welcome to attend.

We had our first SciFoo Lives On session today on Nature Island (Second Nature) in Second Life. We had about a dozen people participate. The topic was "Tools for Open Science". I wanted to explore more fully the actual technology that people are starting to use towards doing more open science. I started off by showing screenshots of UsefulChem wiki and blogs from my poster.

Thanks to Barry Bunin of Collaborative Drug Discovery, we now have a collaborator who will run assays on the compounds from our CombiUgi project. We'll be using our account on CDD to manage the activity results. Phil Rosenthal from UCSF has agreed to run assays on the inhibition of falcipain-2, an enzyme used by the malaria parasite to digest hemoglobin.

After complaining that there was not enough time to cover everything at the Science Foo Camp, and after getting some very positive feedback from our chemical reaction mechanism representation in Second Life, it occurred to me that it would make sense to attempt to continue the conversation in a virtual medium. I have previously presented a poster in Second Life and I was thoroughly impressed with how well it worked.

The past few days have been quite stimulating. The SciFoo conference started right after I got off the plane in San Francisco on Friday evening around 18:00 and lasted till midnight. With the jetlag from the east coast I was exhausted but the energy of the meeting definitely kept my interest. Friday night was the only part of the conference deliberately set up with the traditional format of speakers. The most impressive talk was on the big picture of planetary energy input and consumption. It was refreshing because the speakers seemed genuinely concerned with reporting on the actual state of things, instead of building up evidence to support their pet eco-solution.

I have previously commented on how organic chemistry can be incorporated into Second Life. Andrew Lang has created a script to generate 3D structures of molecules and shown how to represent the docking of a molecule in the receptor site of a protein (this is important for demonstrating how drugs can interfere with infectious agents like the parasite that causes malaria). I have also described how these molecules can be indexed by common search engines, like Google, so that people can discover locations in Second Lif