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Top-down standards will not serve systems biology

Nature volume 440, page 24 (2006)Cite this article

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Sir

Marvin Cassman and his colleagues, in their Commentary “Barriers to progress in systems biology” (Nature 438, 1079; 2005), discuss the development of standards in systems-biology research. We agree with the need for well-curated databases, software systems that can work together to analyse such data and integrated models that can deliver the fruits of systems-based research to laboratory biologists. But we have concerns about the proposed solution, which is presented as a ‘top-down’ approach that ignores many existing and emerging standards. It seems based on false assumptions about the research community and ignores the community it is intended to serve.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health, 44 Binney Street, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA

    John Quackenbush

  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

    Christian Stoeckert

  3. Stanford University, Stanford, California

    Catherine Ball

  4. European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL, Cambridge

    Alvis Brazma

  5. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle

    Robert Gentleman

  6. European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL, Cambridge

    Wolfgang Huber

  7. Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore

    Rafael Irizarry

  8. US National Institute of Standards and Technology,

    Marc Salit

  9. Stanford University, Stanford, California

    Gavin Sherlock

  10. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California

    Paul Spellman

  11. University Health Network, Toronto, Canada

    Neil Winegarden

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  1. John Quackenbush
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  2. Christian Stoeckert
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  3. Catherine Ball
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  11. Neil Winegarden
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Quackenbush, J., Stoeckert, C., Ball, C. et al. Top-down standards will not serve systems biology. Nature 440, 24 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/440024a

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