MIBBI: Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations

Bioscience reporting guidelines and tools

    • To increase the visibility of projects developing guidance for the reporting of biological and biomedical science.
    • To encourage appropriate collaborative development between projects to avoid duplication of effort or competition.
    • To promote the adoption of consensus guidance on reporting by journals and funders.

MIBBI is managed by a mix of community representatives and invited domain experts. The Portal exists to promote extant projects to the wider community (and each other) and to link to relevant resources. The Foundry is a project to synthesize reporting guidlines from various communities into a suite of orthogonal standards. Discussion lists, teleconferences, open-access development and meetings ensure openess and accountability

The MIBBI Project was initially conceived (with a different name) during discussions at the HUPO Proteomics Standards Initiative's 2006 spring meeting in San Francisco between a number of attendees with roles in relevant development projects from various domains. The concept was realized initially through the joint efforts of the Proteomics Standards Initiative, the Genomic Standards Consortium and the MGED RSBI Working Groups. The project initially comprised those projects whose representatives had attended the San Francisco meeting but soon grew beyond that — a trend we expect to continue.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences, prescriptive checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favour with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders. However, such ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists are usually developed independently, within particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains.
Consequently, the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and tracking their evolution is non-trivial; they are also inevitably partially-redundant one against another, and where they overlap arbitrary decisions on wording and substructuring make integration difficult. This presents significant difficulties for the users of checklists; for example, in the area of systems biology, where data from multiple biological domains and technology platforms are routinely combined.
MIBBI provides a common portal to such MI checklists; to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant projects, foster collaborative development and ultimately promote gradual integration.

Figure One. A generalized view of the structure of investigative projects in the life sciences (© ISA working group). This figure asserts that an Investigation (of a particular medical syndrome, environmental effect, etc.) consists of one or more linked Studies (each in the context of a particular biological domain such as toxicology or environmental science) that themselves consist of one or more Assays (analysis of material generated or collected for the study, perhaps by use of an omics techniques such as proteomics).

N.B. Differing levels of detail may be required by different domains; for example, on the origin and history of the biological material, contrast the needs of genomic sequencing (which strain / cell line / cultivar / etc.) with the needs of metabolomics (feeding schedules, etc.).

The 'MIBBI paper', published August 2008 by Nature Biotechnology (free download)
+ Supplementary information (additional figures).
Short paper about MIBBI and its relationships to policy, attitudes and other standards.
The 'MIBBI: Goals, Structures and Operation' document.
Powerpoint: 'MIBBI: Background,Context and Plans'.

NERC & BBSRC