title: Development of public toxicogenomics software for microarray data management and analysis.
abstract: A robust bioinformatics capability is widely acknowledged as central to realizing the promises of toxicogenomics. Successful application of toxicogenomic approaches, such as DNA microarray, inextricably relies on appropriate data management, the ability to extract knowledge from massive amounts of data and the availability of functional information for data interpretation. At the FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR), we are developing a public microarray data management and analysis software, called ArrayTrack. ArrayTrack is Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) supportive for storing both microarray data and experiment parameters associated with a toxicogenomics study. A quality control mechanism is implemented to assure the fidelity of entered expression data. ArrayTrack also provides a rich collection of functional information about genes, proteins and pathways drawn from various public biological databases for facilitating data interpretation. In addition, several data analysis and visualization tools are available with ArrayTrack, and more tools will be available in the next released version. Importantly, gene expression data, functional information and analysis methods are fully integrated so that the data analysis and interpretation process is simplified and enhanced. ArrayTrack is publicly available online and the prospective user can also request a local installation version by contacting the authors.
authors.affiliation: Center for Toxicoinformatics, Division of Biometry and Risk Assessment, NCTR, 3900 NCTR Road, HFT-020, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. wtong@nctr.fda.gov
authors.forename: Weida
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Tong
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Harris
authors.forename: Xiaoxi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.forename: Leming
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Hongmei
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fuscoe
authors.forename: Angela
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Harris
authors.forename: Huixiao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.forename: Qian
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Perkins
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Casciano
mesh_terms: D030541:Databases, Genetic; D023281:Genomics; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D012984:Software; D014116:Toxicology