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The post-”omic” era can be characterized by investigations of dynamic processes within and between cells, tissues and organs. Such investigations are carried out using a combination of interdisciplinary procedures at both the theoretical and experimental level. One aspect of intracellular dynamics is the determination of complex metabolic networks and their high dynamic behavior, and their associated mechanistic pathways.
Continuous technical and methodological advances and improvements have meant that biochemical pathway analysis can now be carried out in much greater depth and with increased efficiency and accuracy.
Unfortunately, such progress has led to a confusing and highly undesirable situation with respect to trying to make the maximum use of the experimental data derived from the functional characterizations of enzymes since a variety of experimental designs and analytical methods have been employed. The result is that there is a lack of systematic collections of comparable functional enzyme data. The pre-requisite for both comparability and reliability of such data is the provision of minimum information about experimental design and experimental results as well as standardization of the conditions and procedures involved in the experiments.
However, the current position is not encouraging: the quality of reported experimental data of enzymes is insufficient for the needs of systems level investigations and thus is, in point of fact, neither applicable for modeling and simulation nor for the functional characterization of the individual cellular components. Consequently, a high quality level balance between experimental in-put data and modeled out-put data needs to be created.
The STRENDA Commission (Standards for Reporting Enzyme Data), founded in 2003, is concerned with the improvement of the quality of reporting functional enzyme data to support, inter alia, enzyme kinetics for application in the in silico investigation of biological systems. The Commission has developed a set of guidelines for the reporting of data in publications. These guidelines along with the recommendations of a number of other groups that are also concerned with the standardization of reporting and experimental procedures are intended to pave the way to Good Publication Practice to ensure data quality and data identification.
The forthcoming 4th ESCEC symposium, organized by the Beilstein-Institute together with the STRENDA Commission, provides a platform to discuss the checklists, to consider further suggestions and to improve existing recommendations. This symposium is also intended to interconnect the diverse standardization initiatives by giving the opportunity to representatives from journals and funding agencies as well as experimentalists and theoreticians to discuss such topics as, e.g. how to organize and store these massive data sets in standard and easily accessible forms, which new experimental tools have to be developed to gather and configure such data into interactive models, which parameters should be measured, what kind of data constitute the minimum required information, and which experimental conditions should be recommended.
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