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1. nano-TAB Introduction

1.1 Rationale

Wiki MarkupNanobioinformatics has been largely recognized as an essential element of our nation’s competitiveness in nanotechnology and a rational approach to employ weight-of-the-evidence strategies that ensure its safe development according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, 2006. The ability to manipulate matter at the atomic scale will enable a broad range of beneficial applications in the electronics, healthcare (e.g. nanomedicine, imaging, and diagnostics), cosmetics, technologies and engineering industries.  Pertinent to the development of promising biomedical nanotechnologies and to the safety of nanoscale materials in general, is a thorough understanding of nanomaterial-biological interactions.  However, a rational approach must be employed early on in nanotechnology evolution to direct the safe development of novel nanotechnologies and provide accurate predictions of nanomaterial-biological interactions based on weight-of-the-evidence \[2\].  This inevitably will require data mining and computer simulation for visualization of the important parameters in an almost infinite set of data from global research efforts in nanoscience and nanotechnology \[3\].  To date, the lack of standardization has been one of the most significant barriers to data sharing. The field of nanomedicine faces many challenges in the development of standards to support meaningful data submission and information exchange.  Nanomaterial characterization requires numerous physico-chemical, in-vitro, and in-vivo assays where measurements mostly depend on non-standardized protocols and diverse technology types.  Unfortunately, information describing the nanomaterial, including functionalizing entities and three-dimensional (3D) structure, is often represented in an undisciplined fashion.  In addition, there has been no standard way to associate this information with the data and metadata from characterization studies.  This lack of standardization has been a significant deterrent to meaningful data sharing across the nanotechnology community; few publications contain sufficient information to enable adequate interpretation of results and successful achievement of experimental reproducibility.  Furthermore, there has been very limited success in using non-standardized data to represent or derive structure-activity-relationships (SARs) that are critical for understanding the effects of nanomaterial structure on biological activity in nanomedicine.

1.2 Significance

The nano-TAB specification is intended to facilitate the submission and exchange of nanomaterial descriptions and characterization data (metadata and summary data) along with the other files (raw/derived data files, image files, protocol documents, etc.) among individual researchers and to/from nanotechnology resources like the NCI’s cancer Nanotechnology Laboratory (caNanoLab) portal \[4\] and the Nanomaterial-Biological Interactions (NBI) knowledgebase \[5\].  Nano-TAB also serves to empower organizations to adopt standard methods for representing data in nanotechnology publications; and to provide researchers with guidelines for representing nanomaterials and characterizations to achieve cross-material comparison.

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