It Is Time for IsoBank

It was back in 1982, when the United States was mired in the Cold War and a recession, that the National Institutes of Health awarded a five-year, $3.2 million grant to a group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop GenBank. It now houses nearly 200 billion bases from 178 million sequences representing more than 300,000 species and is the largest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental data in the world (Strasser 2011). Although it is now difficult to imagine a world without GenBank and the opportunities it provides, its creation did not come without questions—about data collection and distribution, attribution of credit and authorship, and design of infrastructure and access (Strasser 2011). Still, the need for a unifying database of genetic sequences commanded wide agreement. Now is the time to invest in a parallel special-purpose database for a burgeoning field of research with enormous promise: the use of stable isotopes. Isotopic ratios are often idiosyncratic, encoding information about the origin and history of particular matter, whether it be an ancient ice core, a Martian rock, or a fossil. In biological systems, elements such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are light enough for isotopes to be differentially affected by biochemical processes such as photosynthesis and respiration, creating isotopic variation. This is extraordinarily useful for studying biological processes. For example, stable isotopes are routinely used for studies of animal and plant physiology, community and ecosystem ecology, biomedicine, paleobiology, evolution, and climatology. The diversity of questions that can be answered with stable isotopes, coupled with advancements in instrumentation that now enable the analysis of hundreds of samples per week on a single mass spectrometer, is what makes the growth of this field parallel that of DNA sequencing. Thus, in this era of “big data” there is a need for IsoBank, a database to house, organize, vet, and make isotopic data readily available.