The first Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Meeting took place 22-24 May 2013, in Heidelberg, Germany. Instruct is one of the BMS research infrastructures involved in the BioMedBridges project and coordinates the Structural Biology use case: From cells to molecules - integrating structural data.
BioMedBridges was invited to host a session on data integration during the Instruct Access workshop that took place the last day of the conference. To prepare for this session, a survey investigating issues with data integration was presented to the meeting delegates in their conference pack.
Twenty-seven structural biologists returned the survey, where respondents were asked to select answers to specific questions about access to data, sharing of data, and the variety of data and sample sources that they use in their research. The results of the survey highlighted that 81% of respondents have used public bioinformatics/biostructure resources in the past two years, and plan to use them again in the future. Other important data for structural biologists are imaging data from cells, tissues or organisms (41%) and chemical screening data (33%).
A majority of the respondents (70%) would use medical health records that link to data about gene sequences and protein expression, if they had access to such data. Interestingly, about half of the respondents did not report any problems with making their data/samples available for other researchers, or with trying to access a dataset/sample within the last year. Few respondents (~10-15%) reported problems related to lack of an appropriate standard and intellectual property rights when sharing their data with other researchers.
The results of the survey were discussed at the interactive BioMedBridges session in the Access workshop, where BioMedBridges was also presented with additional data integration issues that structural biologists encounter in their research.
The survey and the BioMedBridges session provided a good opportunity for the project to make contacts with the Instruct community. It is important for the project to maintain a two-way communication with the research communities. BioMedBridges was delighted to take part in the meeting, which provided an excellent overview of the latest research developments and exciting new results in structural biology.