Archive by category | Standards

Lack of protocols in cell & molecular biology

Lack of protocols in cell & molecular biology

by George M Church, Senior Editor Image manipulation and selective reporting of images have been recently in the focus of a healthy debate on the issue of scientific data manipulation. Of course, as editors tell us how they detect fakes (“What’s in a picture? The temptation of image manipulation”, Rossner and Yamada, JCB 2004 166:11), there is a danger that authors will be tempted to upgrade their ploys. More importantly, I think that these issues are symptomatic of a much larger problem in Cell & Molecular Biology which is the lack of protocols for getting from raw data to conclusions.  Read more

A visual wiki for biological notation?

A visual wiki for biological notation?

What standards are needed in computational systems biology? The results of a survey on this topic have been recently summarized by Edda Klipp and colleagues (Klipp et al, 2007, Nat Biotech 4:390). Even if it is somewhat unclear how representative the sample of respondents were with respect to the larger systems biology community, some of the top priorities identified are interesting (I list only the three first):  … Read more