Nobel Prize winning data released

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Through its partnership with LabArchives, a provider of online lab notebook software, BioMed Central's open-access journal BMC Research Notes has published Mutagenetix. This is an online open-access repository of data that matches gene mutation via location, structure, and function of the mutated protein, to physical and cellular changes in mice.

The data underpins the discoveries of the mutagenesis programme operated by the Beutler laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, USA (now at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX, USA). The work won Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffmann, and Ralph Steinman The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 but this dataset is expected to have many more applications throughout biology and medicine.

The dataset is published through the LabArchives platform and is linked permanently to a 'Data Note' article published in BMC Research Notes. The Mutagenix database, is available for reuse by other scientists freely, under a Creative Commons waiver.

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz of BioMed Central noted, 'This is an excellent example of how valuable publishing datasets with accompanying journal publications can be. As a result of our partnership with LabArchives, data which extend the Beutler lab's Nobel Prize-winning discoveries are available for public use, and the data are put into context with an associated peer-reviewed journal publication in BMC Research Notes. Also, the authors exemplify best practice in linking data to publications and in data citation, which we hope will help motivate more scientists and funders of research to publish their data in an open access environment.'