MIADE

About MIADE

The MIADE7.3 guidelines (Minimum Information About Disorder Experiments) define the essential information that should be provided so the wider scientific community can properly understand experiments on the structural properties of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs)3 and intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs)2.

In simple terms, these guidelines aim to:

  • make experimental results easier to interpret and use;
  • support direct submission of data into databases;
  • simplify data organization and curation;
  • improve the exchange of information between scientific repositories;
  • ensure that key details about IDR experiments are shared in a consistent way.

To fully understand and compare experimental data, both the biological context and the methodological context are needed.
That’s why the MIADE guidelines recommend always reporting four main components when describing experiments on IDPs:

  1. the specific protein region studied;
  2. the structural state of that region, as determined from the experiment;
  3. the experimental or computational method used;
  4. the data source.

MIADE implementation in DisProt

DisProt stores and represents experimentally determined structural states of IDPs and IDRs and their functions. An important approach to represent and describe the captured data, is the use of stable external identifiers and controlled vocabularies (CV).
In DisProt users can explore MIADE annotations – when available – by clicking on the Toggle button in the Experimental details section of a DisProt evidence. For example, see DisProt entry DP01149 for a comprehensive example of MIADE annotations. 
The entry includes info about mutations (e.g. evidence DP01149r002), temperature and pH (evidence DP01149r019), interacting proteins (e.g. evidence DP01149r018 and DP01149r020).

How the MIADE guidelines came about

Over the past 10 years, the development of new and improved methods and technologies to study IDPs has increased the complexity of the experiments characterizing the structural properties of IDRs. Consequently, the ELIXIR IDP community and HUPO-PSI Consortia work together to define the fundamental complement of data that can support an unambiguous conclusion based on experimental observations. The MIADE guidelines were published in 2023 (Mészáros B. et al. 2023) as the first initial step towards standardized and lossless IDP data representation within the biological community.