Stanford Microarray Database

http://genome-www.stanford.edu/microarray

Ball, C.A., Binkley, G., Gollub, J., Hernandez-Boussard, T., Jin, H., Kaloper, M., Matese, J.C., Brown, P.O., Botstein, D., Sherlock, G.

Department of Genetics, Center for Clinical Sciences Research, 269 Campus Drive, Room 2255b, Stanford University, STanford, CA 94305-5163

Contact sherlock@genome.stanford.edu

Database Description

The Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) stores raw and normalized data for microarray experiments, and provides web interfaces for researchers to retrieve, analyze and visualize their data. SMD's main goal is to act as a data repository for Stanford researchers and their collaborators (there are over 500 registered users), as well as to act as a resource for release of published data. In addition SMD is committed to making its software available to other researchers to create their own microarray databases. SMD makes use of many public sources of biological annotation, which are used to connect the entities on the microarrays with their most current biological information. This is of paramount importance, as expression data in the absence of biological contect are meaningless.

Recent Developments

SMD had it's first source code release on March 15th 2001, and will have had a second release in August 2001. This subsequent release will include a greater degree of abstraction of data retrieval from the database through Perl objects, to make software development more rapid. In addition SMD is committed to adopting the MIAME guidelines for annotating microarray experiments, and expects to have structures in place in early 2002 to hold these new data.