1. Scope
The nano-TAB effort aims to address data sharing challenges in nanotechnology by providing a standard means for identifying nanomaterials and characterizations in a tab-delimited format. Nano-TAB is based on existing standards developed by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA-TAB) file format which represents a set of studies employing a variety of assays and technology types. The nano-TAB specification leverages ISA-TAB files describing investigations, study-samples, and assays and provides extensions to support nanomaterial structural information and assay measurements from the Washington University NanoParticle Ontology (NPO). The nano-TAB standard specification will: enable the submission and exchange of nanomaterials to/from nanotechnology resources like the NCIs caNanoLab nanotechnology portal and the Oregon State Nanomaterial-Biological Interactions (NBI) knowledgebase; empower organizations to adopt standards for representing data in nanotechnology publications; and provide researchers with guidelines for representing nanomaterials and characterizations to achieve cross-material comparison. More information about the proposed standard can be found at http://goo.gl/icVCV
The field of nanomedicine presents a variety of challenges in the development of standards supporting data submission and information exchange. The application of nanotechnology in medicine requires numerous physico-chemical, in vitro, and in vivo assays with measurements dependent on non-standardized protocols and diverse technology types. Representing Structure-Activity-Relationships (SARs) in nanomedicine is critical to understanding the effects of nanomaterial structure on biological activity; however, information describing the nanomaterial including functionalizing entities and 3D structure is often represented in an undisciplined fashion. This lack of standardization has been a significant deterrent to data sharing across the nanotechnology community resulting in publications that contain sparsely enough information to allow for the adequate interpretation of results and the successful achievement of experimental reproducibility.
Keywords
nanotechnology; data sharing; nanomedicine
The title and scope are in draft form and are under development within this ASTM Committee.
Citing ASTM Standards
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