MIADE metadata guidelines: Minimum Information About a Disorder Experiment

An unambiguous description of an experimental setup and analysis, and the subsequent biological observation is vital for accurate data interpretation and reproducible results. Consequently, experimental analyses should be described in a concise, unequivocal, and digestible manner. The aim of minimum information guidelines is to define the fundamental complement of data that can support an unambiguous conclusion on experimental observations. In this document, we present the Minimum Information About Disorder Experiments (MIADE) guidelines to define the minimal fundamental parameters required for non-experts to understand the key findings of an experiment studying intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) or intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs). MIADE guidelines provide recommendations for data producers to describe the results of their experiments at source, for curators to annotate experimental data to community resources and for database developers maintaining community resources to disseminate the data. We give examples of the application of these guidelines in common use cases and describe the implementation of an update to the DisProt IDP database to allow MIADE-compliant annotation. The MIADE guidelines will improve the interpretability of experimental results for data consumers, facilitate direct data submission, simplify data curation, improve data exchange among repositories and standardise the dissemination of the key metadata on an IDP experiment by IDP data sources.