Contributing to FPbase

Contributing

If you would like to help expand and improve the database, please consider contributing to FPbase. In order to make any changes to the database, you must first create an account.

Please be considerate when contributing; only submit information that can be independently verified with an accompanying reference. Users who repeatedly contribute erroneous or unverifiable information will lose contribution priviledges.

There are a few ways to contribute to FPbase:

  1. Submit a new protein

    Use the Protein Submission Form to create a new record for a protein that is not currently in the database. Please search for the protein and common aliases first to confirm that it does not already exits. If you attempt to add a protein that already exists in the database, a validation error will appear and provide a link to the currently existing protein. All new submissions must be accompanied by a DOI for the publication that introduced the protein. If you would like to submit information about unpublished proteins, please contact us.

  2. Update existing protein information

    If a protein record is lacking information, or if you feel that the information is inaccurate, you can submit an update. Towards the bottom of every protein page, you will find a Submit a change link that will bring you to the update page for that particular protein. If you know the slug for protein you may also go directly to the update form for that protein at /protein/[slug]/update/, for example: /protein/mneongreen/update/

  3. Add references to existing proteins

    In the references section of each protein page, there is a button that will allow you to add additional references. This is an excellent place to track publications that may not have introduced the fluorescent protein, but have performed additional characterization of it

  4. Create Public Collections

    Logged-in users can create collections of fluorescent proteins for private use or for sharing publicly. You may view your own collections in your profile, or view all public collections created on FPbase. On each protein page, you can click the book icon () to add the current protein to one of your collections.

For more technical information about the structure of the FPbase database, please refer to the database schema page.

Moderation

While we would like for FPbase to eventually be a comprehensive resource for information about fluorescent proteins, we also put a very strong emphasis on the quality and reliability of the data. As such, we aim to moderate all data that is submitted to FPbase. Currently, user-submitted data will be visible on the website immediately, but protein pages that have unmoderated data will be marked as such with the following alert:

Version History

When a change is made to the database, the revision changeset is logged and revertible (by a moderator) for a certain period of time. If the protein has a previously moderated version, you may click on the link to view the previous verision. When viewing an older revision of a protein page, the following alert will be visible at the top of the page:

Want to Help?

We have implemented a number of server-side data-integrity checks to help reduce the amount of inaccurate or inconsistent information in the database, but manual curation is still required in many cases. If you believe you would make a good moderator and would like to help the project grow, please contact us. Alternatively, simply adding data to the database is a great way to help the project, and we greatly appreciate it!