Sir

We applaud the call in your Editorial 'A place for everything' (Nature 453, 2; 2008) for researchers to record the latitude and longitude of their data, in order to place all biological samples in proper spatial (and temporal) context. We agree that this minimum information guideline should apply to all biological samples taken from the natural environment, and note the pressing need for relevant molecular data to be tagged with geographical location.

The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration — comprising the DNA Data Bank of Japan, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and GenBank — already offers the option of recording latitude and longitude coordinates. This qualifier, among others, was requested by the Consortium for the Barcode of Life to provide the geographical origin of molecules it uses to identify organisms. The “minimum information about a genome sequence” guideline published by the Genomic Standards Consortium (Nature Biotech. 26, 541–547; 2008) calls for this critical field to be mandatory for all genome and metagenome submissions, along with altitude or depth and time of sampling.

Other molecules that are equally critical to tag with this information are the vast number of other marker genes, especially 16S and 18S ribosomal RNA sequences, that are being generated globally from a diverse range of habitats. This registration becomes all the more relevant as ultra-high-throughput sequencing of these molecules continues to be more widely applied. Core to these efforts are projects such as the Environment Ontology and Gazetteer initiatives, which describe environments and place names, respectively. Combined, these resources will support the consistent annotation and retrieval of environmental information associated with an organism or biological sample.

These projects all highlight the growing importance of community-driven initiatives in developing improved standards for reporting experimental data. We look forward to the day when it will be commonplace to view collections of molecules 'on the map', so to speak, such that questions relating to their global and local abundances, distributions, environments and functions can be properly addressed. Getting to this point will require: increased awareness; higher expectations for the quality and quantity of descriptive data recorded; improved standards, ontologies and databases; proof of the value of downstream analyses; and widespread practical changes, such as use of hand-held devices for recording real-time contextual information (and, in the future, for generating data) in the field.