Search the CONFOCAL archive at
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocalIt's great to hear so much enthusiasm for Bionumbers (
www.bionumbers.org ). We would again encourage people to start adding
whatever numbers you stumble upon to the database - building this
database really has to be a community effort, as we currently have only
a limited ability to curate. So, please pass on the URL to your
colleagues as well.
The website includes the ability to post comments and (constructive)
criticism on any of the numbers in the database. So, we hope that the
database can also serve as a platform for achieving a certain degree of
consensus on what the most accurate values and/or ranges of these
numbers are. In this way, experts (often bench scientists) in a field
could provide newcomers (often computational scientists) with the best
possible numbers to use in planning experiments and constructing models.
We would like to open up a discussion we've been having to the listserv
- although we are all admittedly quite young, it is our impression that
in the past, there was a certain reward for going to the trouble of
acquiring accurate numbers. For instance, we often read papers from the
1970s which are essentially quantitations of various parameters (ie. the
concentrations of major ions in frog eggs) - not the "complete" stories
that editors currently seem to require.
Does anybody know of mainstream journals that will publish papers that
simply describe high quality, meaningful (ie. useful, pertinent,
non-redundant) measurements - without a so-called complete story or
mechanism? Would being able to publish in such a journal encourage you
to measure more bionumbers?
Paul Jorgensen, Ron Milo & Michael Springer
PS> Many thanks to whomever contributed the value of pi to Bionumbers.
Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
200 Longwood Avenue, Alpert 536
Boston, MA, 02115
U.S.A.
Ph: (617)-432-2294
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