Community standards to facilitate development and address challenges in metabolic modeling.
Publication Title
Mol Syst Biol
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-1-2020
Abstract
Standardization of data and models facilitates effective communication, especially in computational systems biology. However, both the development and consistent use of standards and resources remain challenging. As a result, the amount, quality, and format of the information contained within systems biology models are not consistent and therefore present challenges for widespread use and communication. Here, we focused on these standards, resources, and challenges in the field of constraint-based metabolic modeling by conducting a community-wide survey. We used this feedback to (i) outline the major challenges that our field faces and to propose solutions and (ii) identify a set of features that defines what a "gold standard" metabolic network reconstruction looks like concerning content, annotation, and simulation capabilities. We anticipate that this community-driven outline will help the long-term development of community-inspired resources as well as produce high-quality, accessible models within our field. More broadly, we hope that these efforts can serve as blueprints for other computational modeling communities to ensure the continued development of both practical, usable standards and reproducible, knowledge-rich models.
Specialty
Institute for Systems Biology