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Public Library of Science, PLoS Biology, 1(13), p. e1002033, 2015

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033

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Finding Our Way through Phenotypes

Journal article published in 2015 by Andrew R. Deans ORCID, Suzanna E. Lewis, Eva Huala, Salvatore S. Anzaldo, Michael Ashburner, James P. Balhoff ORCID, David C. Blackburn ORCID, Judith A. Blake, J. Gordon Burleigh, Bruno Chanet, Laurel D. Cooper, Mé Courtot, Sándor Csösz, Hong Cui, Wasila Dahdul and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility.