Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Promoting coherent minimum reporting guidelines for biological and biomedical investigations: the MIBBI project

Nature Biotechnology volume 26, pages 889–896 (2008)Cite this article

To fully understand the context, methods, data and conclusions that pertain to an experiment, one must have access to a range of background information. However, the current diversity of experimental designs and analytical techniques complicates the discovery and evaluation of experimental data; furthermore, the increasing rate of production of those data compounds the problem. Community opinion increasingly favors that a regularized set of the available metadata ('data about the data') pertaining to an experiment1,2 be associated with the results, making explicit both the biological and methodological contexts. Many journals and funding agencies now require that authors reporting microarray-based transcriptomics experiments comply with the Minimum Information about a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) checklist3 as a prerequisite for publication4,5,6,7. Similarly, minimum information guidelines for reporting proteomics experiments and describing systems biology models are gaining broader support in their respective database communities8,9; and progress is being made toward the standardization of the reporting of clinical trials in the medical literature10. Such minimum information checklists promote transparency in experimental reporting, enhance accessibility to data and support effective quality assessment, increasing the general value of a body of work (and the competitiveness of the originators).

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: The eighteen highest-ranked ad hoc concepts, according to Table 1.

References

  1. Quackenbush, J. Standardizing the standards. Mol. Syst. Biol. 2, 2006.0010 (2006).

  2. Anonymous. Under the MIAME sun. Nat. Methods 3, 415 (2006).

  3. Brazma, A. et al. Minimum information about a microarray experiment (MIAME)—toward standards for microarray data. Nat. Genet. 29, 365–371 (2001).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Anonymous. Microarray standards at last. Nature 419, 323 (2002).

  5. Ball, C.A. et al. A guide to microarray experiments—an open letter to the scientific journals. Lancet 360, 1019 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Ball, C.A. et al. Standards for microarray data. Science 298, 539 (2002).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Ball, C.A. et al. The underlying principles of scientific publication. Bioinformatics 18, 1409 (2002).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Taylor, C.F. et al. The minimum information about a proteomics experiment (MIAPE). Nat. Biotechnol. 25, 887–893 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Le Novère, N. et al. Minimum information requested in the annotation of biochemical models (MIRIAM). Nat. Biotechnol. 23, 1509–1515 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Altman, D.G., Simera, I., Hoey, J., Moher, D. & Schulz, K. EQUATOR: reporting guidelines for health research. Lancet 371, 1149–1150 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Field, D. & Sansone, S.-A. A special issue on data standards. OMICS 10, 84–93 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Morrison, N. et al. Concept of sample in OMICS technology. OMICS 10, 127–137 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. Morrison, N. et al. Standard annotation of environmental OMICS data: application to the transcriptomics domain. OMICS 10, 172–178 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Jones, A.R. et al. The Functional Genomics Experiment model (FuGE): an extensible framework for standards in functional genomics. Nat. Biotechnol. 25, 1127–1133 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Sansone, S.-A. et al. A strategy capitalizing on synergies: the Reporting Structure for Biological Investigation (RSBI) working group. OMICS 10, 164–171 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  16. Sansone, S.-A. et al. The first RSBI (ISA-TAB) workshop: “Can a simple format work for complex studies?” OMICS published online, doi:10.1089/omi.2008.0019 (2008).

  17. Smith, B. et al. The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration. Nat. Biotechnol. 25, 1251–1255 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Taylor, C.F. et al. The work of the Human Proteome Organisation's Proteomics Standards Initiative (HUPO PSI). OMICS 10, 145–151 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  19. Fiehn, O. et al. Establishing reporting standards for metabolomic and metabonomic studies: a call for participation. OMICS 10, 158–163 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  20. Field, D. et al. The minimum information about a genome sequence (MIGS) specification. Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 541–547 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  21. Deutsch, E.W. et al. Minimum information specification for in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry experiments (MISFISHIE). Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 305–312 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We. acknowledge funding from the UK Natural Environmental Research Council's Environmental Bioinformatics Centre and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/E025080/1) to D.F. and S.-A.S. to support C.F.T. and MIBBI. Work on MIFlowCyt is supported by the US National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (EB005034-01) and by Bioinformatics Integration Support Contract A140076 from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. R.R.B. is supported by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, by the International Society for the Advancement of Cytology and by grant funding from the US National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health (R01EB005034). N.W.H. acknowledges the support of the European Union Framework VI project META-PHOR (Food-ST-2006-03622). F.G., P.L. and work on CARMEN are supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/E002331/1). K.T. acknowledges support from Science Foundation Ireland. Work on MIAME/Tox and MIAME/Nutr by P.R-S. is supported by the NuGO (NoE 503630) and CarcinoGenomics (PL 037712) European Union projects. Work on MIARE is supported by the eDIKT project. Opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US National Science Foundation or the US National Institutes of Health.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, CB10 1SD, Cambridgeshire, UK

    Chris F Taylor, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Rolf Apweiler, Alvis Brazma, Henning Hermjakob, Nicolas Le Novère, Sandra Orchard, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Daniel Schober & Peter Sterk

  2. Natural Environment Research Council Environmental Bioinformatics Centre, Mansfield Road, OX1 3SR, Oxford, UK

    Chris F Taylor, Dawn Field, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Tim Booth, Tanya Gray & Norman Morrison

  3. Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group, Oxford Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Mansfield Road, OX1 3SR, Oxford, UK

    Dawn Field & Tanya Gray

  4. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, Cambridgeshire, UK

    Jan Aerts

  5. Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EH, UK

    Michael Ashburner

  6. Department of Biochemistry, Stanford Microarray Database, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, 94305-5307, California, USA

    Catherine A Ball

  7. Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Michel-Servet 1, Geneva, 1211, Switzerland

    Pierre-Alain Binz

  8. Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) SA, Avenue de Champel 25, Geneva, 1206, Switzerland

    Pierre-Alain Binz

  9. Jax Mouse Phenome Project, The Jackson Laboratory, 600 Main Street, Bar Harbor, 04609, Maine, USA

    Molly Bogue

  10. Terry Fox Laboratory, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, V5Z 1L3, British Columbia, Canada

    Ryan R Brinkman

  11. The Lance Armstrong Foundation, PO Box 161150, Austin, 78716-1150, Texas, USA

    Adam Michael Clark

  12. Institute for Systems Biology, 1441 N. 34th Street, Seattle, 98103, Washington, USA

    Eric W Deutsch

  13. University of California Davis, Genome Center, 451 East Health Sciences Drive, Davis, 95616, California, USA

    Oliver Fiehn

  14. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Lockheed Martin Information Technology, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 27709-2233, USA

    Jennifer Fostel

  15. Division of Pathway Medicine, University of Edinburgh Medical School, The Chancellor's Building, Little France Crescent, Edinburgh, EH16 4SB, UK

    Peter Ghazal, Graeme Grimes & Javier Santoyo-Lopez

  16. School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

    Frank Gibson & Phillip Lord

  17. Bioinformatics Group, Medical Research Council Mammalian Genetics Unit, Harwell, OX11 0RD, Oxfordshire, UK

    John M Hancock & Ann-Marie Mallon

  18. Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, SY23 3DB, Aberystwyth, UK

    Nigel W Hardy

  19. Indigo BioSystems, Inc., 111 Congressional Boulevard, Suite 160, Carmel, 46032, Indiana, USA

    Randall K Julian Jr

  20. Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, 22230, Virginia, USA

    Matthew Kane

  21. Beilstein-Institut zur Förderung der Chemischen Wissenschaften, Trakehner Strasse 7-9, Frankfurt am Main, D-60487, Germany

    Carsten Kettner

  22. Office of Technology and Industrial Relations, Office of the Director, National Cancer Institute, Bldg 31A, Rm 10A52, Bethesda, 20892, Maryland, USA

    Christopher Kinsinger & Henry Rodriguez

  23. Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute, 1900 9th Avenue, Seattle, 98101, Washington, USA

    Eugene Kolker

  24. Seattle Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center, 4800 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, 98105, Washington, USA

    Eugene Kolker

  25. Department of Plant Systems Biology, Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, Technologiepark 927, Ghent, B-9052, Belgium

    Martin Kuiper

  26. Molecular Genetics, Ghent University, Ghent, B-9052, Belgium

    Martin Kuiper

  27. Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, N-7491, Norway

    Martin Kuiper

  28. Department of Plant Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, 30602-7271, Georgia, USA

    Jim Leebens-Mack

  29. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Life Sciences Addition, University of California, Berkeley, 94729-3200, California, USA

    Suzanna E Lewis

  30. Department of Pathology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, 75390, Texas, USA

    Nishanth Marthandan & Richard H Scheuermann

  31. RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center, 3-1-1 Koyadai, Tsukuba-shi, 305-0074, Ibaraki, Japan

    Hiroshi Masuya

  32. Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen), Lancaster University, Institute for Advanced Studies, IAS Building, County South, Lancaster, LA1 4YD, UK

    Ruth McNally

  33. Division of Molecular Genome Analysis, German Cancer Research Center, Im Neuenheimer Feld 580, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Alexander Mehrle, Heiko Rosenfelder & Stefan Wiemann

  34. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

    Norman Morrison

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

    John Quackenbush

  36. Department of Animal Science, Center for Integrated Animal Genomics, Iowa State University, 2255 Kildee Hall, Ames, 50011-3150, Iowa, USA

    James M Reecy

  37. Bristol-Myers Squibb, Route 206 & Province Line Road, Princeton, 08543-4000, New Jersey, USA

    Donald G Robertson

  38. NuGO, The European Nutrigenomics Organisation,

    Philippe Rocca-Serra

  39. Department of Philosophy and Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, University at Buffalo, New York, 14260, USA

    Barry Smith

  40. AstraZeneca UK Ltd., Brixham, TQ5 8BA, Devon, UK

    Jason Snape

  41. Department of Genetics, Center for Bioinformatics, 423 Guardian Drive, Philadelphia, 19104-6021, Pennsylvania, USA

    Christian J Stoeckert Jr

  42. School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin, 2, Ireland

    Keith Tipton

  43. Department of Plant Science, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

    Andreas Untergasser

  44. Center for Medical Genetics, Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, 9000, Belgium

    Jo Vandesompele

Authors
  1. Chris F Taylor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Dawn Field
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Susanna-Assunta Sansone
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Jan Aerts
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Rolf Apweiler
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Michael Ashburner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Catherine A Ball
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Pierre-Alain Binz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Molly Bogue
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  10. Tim Booth
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  11. Alvis Brazma
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  12. Ryan R Brinkman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  13. Adam Michael Clark
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  14. Eric W Deutsch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  15. Oliver Fiehn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  16. Jennifer Fostel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  17. Peter Ghazal
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  18. Frank Gibson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  19. Tanya Gray
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  20. Graeme Grimes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  21. John M Hancock
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  22. Nigel W Hardy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  23. Henning Hermjakob
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  24. Randall K Julian Jr
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  25. Matthew Kane
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  26. Carsten Kettner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  27. Christopher Kinsinger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  28. Eugene Kolker
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  29. Martin Kuiper
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  30. Nicolas Le Novère
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  31. Jim Leebens-Mack
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  32. Suzanna E Lewis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  33. Phillip Lord
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  34. Ann-Marie Mallon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  35. Nishanth Marthandan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  36. Hiroshi Masuya
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  37. Ruth McNally
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  38. Alexander Mehrle
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  39. Norman Morrison
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  40. Sandra Orchard
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  41. John Quackenbush
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  42. James M Reecy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  43. Donald G Robertson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  44. Philippe Rocca-Serra
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  45. Henry Rodriguez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  46. Heiko Rosenfelder
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  47. Javier Santoyo-Lopez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  48. Richard H Scheuermann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  49. Daniel Schober
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  50. Barry Smith
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  51. Jason Snape
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  52. Christian J Stoeckert Jr
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  53. Keith Tipton
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  54. Peter Sterk
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  55. Andreas Untergasser
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  56. Jo Vandesompele
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  57. Stefan Wiemann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Chris F Taylor, Dawn Field or Susanna-Assunta Sansone.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

D.F., S.-A.S. and C.F.T. conceived and designed the concept of MIBBI as synergistic project; D.F. and S.-A.S. raised the funds to support MIBBI activities, and C.F.T. performed the analysis presented in this paper; all authors discussed the results and implications and commented on the manuscript.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–2 (PDF 422 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Taylor, C., Field, D., Sansone, SA. et al. Promoting coherent minimum reporting guidelines for biological and biomedical investigations: the MIBBI project. Nat Biotechnol 26, 889–896 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.1411

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.1411

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing