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UNLESS biologists and their computers learn to speak a whole new language,
much of the useful information in the human genome sequence announced last week
will go to waste, researchers said at the Beyond Genome 2000 meeting in San
Francisco last month. To deal with this problem, some experts are calling for
new computing standards reminiscent of those that created the World Wide
Web.

Biologists are already drowning in floods of genetic data, says Eric Neumann
of 3rd Millennium, a Massachusetts-based bioinformatics company. Apart from the
3 billion DNA letters of our chromosomes, efforts to record gene expression
patterns in tissues and how our proteins fold and interact will generate data
sets several orders of magnitude larger.

Neumann and Vincent Schachter of Paris-based software company Hybrigenics
decided that a worldwide consortium is necessary. They announced their proposal
for a so-called BioPathways Consortium in a workshop at last week鈥檚 meeting. One
immediate goal is to adapt a computer language such as XML鈥攁 Web language
that integrates and displays different types of information on pages鈥攖o
the special problems of biology. They are starting an open exchange of such
software and ideas on their website (www.BioPathways.org).

Kevin Morgan, a toxicologist with GlaxoWellcome at Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina, hopes the consortium will free biologists from the 鈥渟oftware
jungle鈥� and give them more time to interpret their results. 鈥淲hat the computer
spits out is just the beginning,鈥� he says.