Genome Standards
With the large number of genomes being sequenced and published, the need for a standard set of information that should be reported has grown. The Genome Standards Consortium is working on that. The MIGS, or “Minimum Information about a Genome Sequence” specification is about to be published in Nature Biotechnology in February. You can comment on the standards checklist here.
This prompted me to look at the current state of the Microarray standards, or MIAME: Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment.
http://www.mged.org/index.html, or MGED site has links to that.
These are important to know about if you will be a submitter of information. But also as a consumer of the information you need to know about this for a full understanding of the data.
And the MGED site links to a PLOS paper that says sharing detailed date increases citation rate!
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000308
For another project I’m working on I was examining the BioPax standards. This group is working on a common format for pathway and network information.
The group can be found here: http://www.biopax.org/
And their group wiki is here:
http://biopaxwiki.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/