The Data is Already Out There

The Business Bytes Genes Molecules blog's Deepak Singh says it may be time to put away the microarray gene expression experiments and pay attention to the data that's already been gathered by other researchers to get more focused on "useful science." Singh, who references Atul Butte's talk at the Sage Congress on publicly available data, says there will soon be sufficient public data available for "smart people ... to do a lot of interesting things, such as identifying data-driven candidate genes." The key lessons Butte presented, Singh says, are: sufficient data already exists to impact medicine, public molecular data is of high quality, imperfect annotations are still very useful, researchers should focus on using the tools they really need, and that students need to be trained to use data to "initiate science."