Turn 'Oops' into 'Oooh'
18/01/12 15:16 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Wed, 01/18/2012 - 15:16.
Negative results can arise from the testing of hypotheses that turn out to be incorrect and/or because there are problems with the methodologies used to test the hypotheses. If the methodologies are sound and properly executed, the resulting data remains invaluable, even if they do not support the original hypothesis. Often, there may be insufficient data initially to generate a testable hypothesis, so discovery-based research approaches that produce a wealth of data can be extremely insightful. Tragically, probably more than 90% of the scientific data that are generated by scientists are never published, and they are usually trashed once a principal investigator closes down his/her laboratory, usually with their retirement.
A journal of negative results as proposed is not really the proper venue for storage of what is really orphan data, i.e. positive data not linked to a specific hypothesis. Within the biomedical community, there are many repositories of raw data, including for gene sequences, mutations, mRNA levels, phosphorylation sites and other covalent modifications, etc. These can be queried online, usually with open-access.
In this spirit of preserving proteomics data that are linked to perturbations of specific model systems, Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation has provided open access to immunoblotting data (www.kinet.ca) and antibody microarray data (http://207.150.202.174) from over 10,000 cell and tissue lysates that have been analyzed in-house. The KiNET-IB database features over 200,000 measurements of protein expression and phosphorylation with our Kinetworks™ multi-immunoblotting method, whereas the KiNET-AM database contains over 1.5 million measurements obtained with our Kinex™ 800 Antibody Microarrays.
Link to the original blog post.
Negative results can arise from the testing of hypotheses that turn out to be incorrect and/or because there are problems with the methodologies used to test the hypotheses. If the methodologies are sound and properly executed, the resulting data remains invaluable, even if they do not support the original hypothesis. Often, there may be insufficient data initially to generate a testable hypothesis, so discovery-based research approaches that produce a wealth of data can be extremely insightful. Tragically, probably more than 90% of the scientific data that are generated by scientists are never published, and they are usually trashed once a principal investigator closes down his/her laboratory, usually with their retirement.
A journal of negative results as proposed is not really the proper venue for storage of what is really orphan data, i.e. positive data not linked to a specific hypothesis. Within the biomedical community, there are many repositories of raw data, including for gene sequences, mutations, mRNA levels, phosphorylation sites and other covalent modifications, etc. These can be queried online, usually with open-access.
In this spirit of preserving proteomics data that are linked to perturbations of specific model systems, Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation has provided open access to immunoblotting data (www.kinet.ca) and antibody microarray data (http://207.150.202.174) from over 10,000 cell and tissue lysates that have been analyzed in-house. The KiNET-IB database features over 200,000 measurements of protein expression and phosphorylation with our Kinetworks™ multi-immunoblotting method, whereas the KiNET-AM database contains over 1.5 million measurements obtained with our Kinex™ 800 Antibody Microarrays.
Link to the original blog post.