Miape web toolkit: a user-friendly work frame to conncect and share proteomics standards in the lab

In spite of the current interest in data-sharing along distributed or collaborative proteomics projects, the large amount of information being generated and exchanged by specialized laboratories requires standards and interchangeable data formats for its correctly spreading. The Human Proteome Organisation Proteomics Standards Initiative (HUPO-PSI) has published a set of standard MIAPE (Minimum Information About a Proteomics Experiment) guidelines accompanying with data exchange formats normally represented in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that will certainly contribute to proteomics data-sharing within the scientific community. In addition, specialized journals have emphasized the use of these guidelines and standards to facilitate the evaluation and publication of new articles. However, it is our opinion that there is an evident lack of bioinformatics tools specifically designed to create and edit the required information and its connectivity with the proteomics pipeline. Thus, development of new software tools will facilitate cooperation among proteomics research groups and will increase the quality of the proteomics data available in openaccess repositories.