OpenWetWare

OpenWetWare is a long-standing open-science knowledge base designed to support wet-lab researchers, synthetic biologists, and bioengineering students by providing freely shared protocols, course materials, tutorials, and lab notebooks. Hosted originally at MIT, it functions as a community-edited wiki where labs and individual researchers can document experimental methods, share troubleshooting insights, and maintain public lab pages. OpenWetWare played a foundational role in early synthetic biology, especially for the iGEM community, offering a collaborative space to develop and refine experimental techniques. Although the pace of updates has slowed as newer platforms emerged, it remains a valuable repository of practical lab knowledge and a symbol of the open-biology ethos—demonstrating how shared documentation can accelerate learning, reproducibility, and collective problem-solving in the life sciences.