A new opinion piece published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences urges the creation of an IsoBank, a central repository for isotopic data.
The article is an outcome a workshop sponsored by the Biodiversity Collections Network, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
An excerpt of the article follows:
Stable isotopes encode and integrate the origin of matter; thus, their analysis offers tremendous potential to address questions across diverse scientific disciplines. Indeed, the broad applicability of stable isotopes, coupled with advancements in high-throughput analysis, have created a scientific field that is growing exponentially, and generating data at a rate paralleling the explosive rise of DNA sequencing and genomics. Centralized data repositories, such as GenBank, have become increasingly important as a means for archiving information, and “Big Data” analytics of these resources are revolutionizing science and everyday life.
Read the article at http://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/2997.short.