26 | | The next stage of epidemiological and genetic research will depend critically on large collections of high quality samples and data. A wealth of panels from natural human and experimental model organism populations is readily available, but their annotation is scattered between thousands broad inter-institute panel biobanks and deep departmental boutique disease biobanks, each with their own data front-end. While standardization efforts have produced simple formats for the exchange and integration of high throughput data, such as [http://www.mged.org/mage-tab/ MAGE-TAB] for microarrays and [http://www.xgap.org XGAP] for xQTL studies an equally lightweight system for phenotypic data is still left wanted |