The computational systems-biology community has made enormous progress in improving access to models. Scientists now share programming languages for encoding models and have built public repositories to share them. However, the current challenge is quality control; systems biologists won't use publicly available models if they can't search them properly, or if the reuse of a model is hampered by mistakes.

To address these issues, an international group of scientists from 14 organizations have devised a new standard for defining biochemical models, known as MIRIAM (minimum information requested in the annotation of biochemical models) to help researchers to exchange and understand computer-generated biochemical models.

“MIRIAM is divided into two parts. The first part is a set of rules that describe how we should present a model...the second part explains how to annotate every model component so that we can identify them”, said Nicolas Le Novère, group leader at European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute (6 December 2005, EMBL press release).

Four biochemical model databases are in the process of updating their repositories to meet MIRIAM's criteria.

MIRIAM provides users with a reasonable level of quality assurance. Not only academic researchers will benefit from this new system, but companies might also use biochemical models for the purpose of drug development.

“We also hope that journal editors will adopt MIRIAM as a quality control measure for papers that describe models. This approach has worked well for other fields, by enabling authors, publishers and data providers to work together to improve access to meaningful biological information”, Le Novère concluded (6 December 2005, EMBL press release).