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Correspondence

Nature 440, 24 (2 March 2006) | doi:10.1038/440024a; Published online 1 March 2006

Top-down standards will not serve systems biology

John Quackenbush1, Christian Stoeckert2, Catherine Ball3, Alvis Brazma4, Robert Gentleman5, Wolfgang Huber6, Rafael Irizarry7, Marc Salit8, Gavin Sherlock9, Paul Spellman10 & Neil Winegarden11

  1. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, 44 Binney Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
    Email: johnq@jimmy.harvard.edu
  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
  3. Stanford University, Stanford, California
  4. European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL, Cambridge
  5. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle
  6. European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL, Cambridge
  7. Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore
  8. US National Institute of Standards and Technology
  9. Stanford University, Stanford, California
  10. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California
  11. University Health Network, Toronto, Canada

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.