Biological Sciences Division
Published January 6, 2015 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Finding Our Way through Phenotypes

Creators

  • 1. Pennsylvania State University
  • 2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
  • 3. Carnegie Institution for Science
  • 4. Arizona State University
  • 5. University of Cambridge
  • 6. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
  • 7. California Academy of Sciences
  • 8. The Jackson Laboratory
  • 9. University of Florida
  • 10. Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle
  • 11. Oregon State University
  • 12. Simon Fraser University
  • 13. Ecology Research Group
  • 14. University of Arizona
  • 15. University of South Dakota
  • 16. University of Delhi
  • 17. Howard University
  • 18. University of Chicago

Description

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility.

Files

journal.pbio.1002033.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033
Other
oai:uchicago.tind.io:8217

Funding

U.S. National Science Foundation
DEB-0956049

UChicago Information

Division(s)
Biological Sciences Division
Department(s)
Organismal Biology and Anatomy