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The full complement of the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI), Minimum Information About a Proteomics Experiment (MIAPE), recommended reporting guidelines are now available for community review on the Nature Biotechnology website.

The manuscripts range from the definition of the MIAPE concept to the individual guidelines themselves which cover, Mass Spectrometry, Mass Spectrometry Informatics, Gel Electrophoresis and Molecular Interaction experiments. A further paper on the PSI protein modification ontology (PSI-MOD) is also listed.

I have been using the "user powered content" site Digg (any excuse at the moment to distract me from thesis writing) and I am enjoying the fact that the stories are coming to me with little effort, in other words I don't have to find the blog or site first and then subscribe. One of the "stories" that I found on Digg was an interview with Matthew Sparkes, Web Executive at New Scientist, about the effects of social media on online publications (i.e Digg). It highlights the increase in social media sites such as blogging and user driven content, on the traditional media and even the traditional content providers. It stops short of saying how New Scientist are going to deal with this phenomenon but they obviously recognise the importance and impact.

NewScientist of all places are talking about ontologies. Specifically An ontology for scientific experiments.

"Called EXPO, it can be used to translate scientific experiments into a format that can be interpreted by a computer."

Wow! translate experiments, that's impressive I would love to find out how the scrawny hand-writing, contained inside the standard lab notebook, dog-eared and drenched in all manner or reagents, gets translated into an ontology, that's more impressive than the ontology itself.