Editorials in 2010

Data tables are a central element of most scientific papers. Simplified tables with separation of data storage from presentation format are ways to increase the impact and use of research data.

The field of genetics owes its existence and most of its methods to agriculture. This year, genomic strategies and tools have notably begun to pay back the favor. Crop plants may be not only the discipline's most readily translated applications but also its most fruitful model organisms.

Whereas plans for data generation and public release can be agreed upon between data producers and their funders, community standards for the reporting, analysis and publication of high throughput data require wider discussion and broad consensus.

Newborn screening panels for genetic diseases are now nearly uniform across the United States, and expanded panels now test for diseases for which there is no known treatment. This expansion of newborn screening raises questions about whether traditional assumptions of implied consent are appropriate.

We now have adapted our preprint archive, Nature Precedings, to host project descriptions, community standards papers and funder policies. Citable project descriptions provide a guide to the resources available and create a mechanism to give data producers citation credit.

A group of medical geneticists from the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea are seeking support for an enduring cooperative research structure. Their research productivity and ability to collaborate are both proven. The expected value of the proposed organization is high.

Analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) show that common SNPs can account for the majority of the heritability of complex traits, but that there are likely to be limits to the usefulness of the current strategy of accumulating common variants of small effect for risk prediction. The ongoing success of GWAS has implications for functional characterization of trait-associated loci.

Articles in the Analysis format report primary research carried out on publications, datasets or research practices. We see Analyses as a way to generate new hypotheses, test data integrity and promote research integration.

Recent agreement on stable reference sequences for reporting human genetic variants now allows us to mandate the use of the allele naming conventions developed by the Human Genome Variation Society.

Research is a necessity for the Middle Eastern countries currently growing their knowledge economies, and it is the key to their achieving autonomous control of their people's healthcare. To sustain knowledge growth, policymakers need to learn to trust researchers while also insisting upon evidence for the advice they get from them.

The journal publishes papers from a very broad geographical catchment, and we invite peer referees from among the world's best genetics researchers in order to attract and publish papers of a uniformly high standard. We need to do more to recruit outstanding referees from under-represented regions.

Systems models and biomarker studies both pose the problem of wrangling high information content. Such publications can be made easier to review and to use if they propose explicit alternative hypotheses and show experimental exclusion of each competing explanation. In practice, we will need to be able to identify and independently cite multiple hypotheses and related experiments within a published work.

Data worthy of integration with the results of other researchers need to be prepared to explicit export standards, linked to appropriate metadata and offered with field-specific caveats for use. Data exchange may need to be taught and discussed in handshaking workshops.