Mattes William B
Department of Toxicology, The Critical Path Institute, Rockville, Maryland, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2008;460:221-38. doi: 10.1007/978-1-60327-048-9_11.
Public consortia provide a forum for addressing questions requiring more resources than one organization alone could bring to bear and engaging many sectors of the scientific community. They are particular well suited for tackling some of the questions encountered in the field of toxicogenomics, where the number of studies and microarray analyses would be prohibitively expensive for a single organization to carry out. Five consortia that stand out in the field of toxicogenomics are the Institutional Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI) Committee on the Application of Genomics to Mechanism Based Risk Assessment, the Toxicogenomics Research Consortium, the MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) Consortium, the InnoMed PredTox effort, and the Predictive Safety Testing Consortium. Collectively, these consortia efforts have addressed issues such as reproducibility of microarray results, standard practice for assays and analysis, relevance of microarray results to conventional end points, and robustness of statistical models on diverse data sets. Their results demonstrate the impact that the pooling of resources, experience, expertise, and insight found in consortia can have.
公共财团提供了一个平台，用于解决那些需要比单个组织所能动用的更多资源才能应对的问题，并促使科学界的多个部门参与进来。它们特别适合解决毒理基因组学领域中遇到的一些问题，在该领域，对于单个组织来说，开展研究和微阵列分析的数量将极其昂贵。在毒理基因组学领域表现突出的五个财团分别是机构生命科学研究所（ILSI）健康与环境科学研究所（HESI）基于机制的风险评估基因组学应用委员会、毒理基因组学研究联盟、微阵列质量控制（MAQC）联盟、InnoMed PredTox计划以及预测性安全测试联盟。总体而言，这些财团所做的工作解决了诸如微阵列结果的可重复性、检测和分析的标准做法、微阵列结果与传统终点的相关性以及不同数据集上统计模型的稳健性等问题。它们的成果证明了财团中资源、经验、专业知识和洞察力的汇集所能产生的影响。
