From owner-metabolic-reg@net.bio.net Fri Sep 10 22:59:00 1999 Path: biosci!NCGR.ORG!pjm From: pjm@NCGR.ORG ("Pedro Mendes") Newsgroups: bionet.metabolic-reg Subject: post-genomic data flood deconvolution activities Date: 10 Sep 1999 16:58:59 -0700 Organization: BIOSCI International Newsgroups for Molecular Biology Lines: 46 Sender: daemon@net.bio.net Distribution: world Message-ID: <199909102351.RAA09650@madison.ncgr.org> References: <7rbt3g$dch$1@dyfi.aber.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: net.bio.net On 10 Sep 99, at 22:28, Douglas B. Kell wrote: > .... > [a lot of other stuff on a different topic] > > Looks like a serious off-line topic for BTK Stellenbosch, where we could > also be wise (Jannie/Johann...?) to think about getting the genome > metabolism crowd involved here in integrating MCA/modelling into the > post-genomic data flood deconvolution activities - the > Mendes/Karp/KEGG/e-cell people in particular - a few links at > http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/dbk/metabol.htm - before they all set up their > own systems that we would wish had been different. I totally agree (except that there is yet no database set up by Mendes, but it won't be long). Like many said in Visegrad, BTKers have to be proactive in this area. We risk being left out by the molbio community simply because they do not know about our activities. There are also enough people out there who despite knowing about our theories, formalisms and methods, will reinvent the wheel and get all the credit. We cannot sit down and let this happen. At Stellenbosch we could do a lot of good by keeping ahead of the game. From what I see in the preliminary program there are already two good subjects for this: "What is a metabolic pathway?" and "X-omics". Especially on the pathways question, the bulk of the molbio crowd is not yet thinking about this. The large majority take for granted the standard textbook metabolic pathways. Viz the current pathway databases like KEGG or WIT. The next generation of pathway databases will go much further... and before someone rediscovers things like elementary modes (oopos, they already did!) and steals the glory from Schuster et al. we better advance our ideas and make them widely heard. My hopes for Stellenbosch is that we have a productive discussion about what is really a pathway and then take the pain to write a review/position paper echoing the discussion. Joint authorship by several groups would be great and it would really help if someone could do a bit of political manouvering to get it to a big name like Nature or Science. Pedro Dr. Pedro Mendes http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/pedro/prmhome.htm National Center for Genome Resources, 1800-A, Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87505, USA http://www.ncgr.org .