A working group including scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), the Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Center (NASC), The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) has set out to extend the MIAME standard and to establish a list of controlled vocabularies for plant microarray experiments (MIAME/Plant).

Why do we need a plant-specific standard?

With the recent accumulation of plant gene expression data, it has become essential to structure experimental annotation such that the experiments can be replicated precisely, analyzed and interpreted correctly, and be easily compared with other experiments. Moreover, the use of ontologies and standards are essential for managing and sharing these data (Stoeckert et al., 2002).This requires the definition of controlled vocabularies that go beyond the absolute minimum as defined by the MIAME 1.1 standard.

Stoeckert, C.J., Jr., Causton, H.C., and Ball, C.A. (2002). Microarray databases: standards and ontologies. Nat Genet 32 Suppl, 469-473.