The ArrayExpress gene expression database: a software engineering and implementation perspective

Abstract

Motivation: The lack of microarray data management systems and databases is still one of the major problems faced by many life sciences laboratories. While developing the public repository for microarray data ArrayExpress we had to find novel solutions to many non-trivial software engineering problems. Our experience will be both relevant and useful for most bioinformaticians involved in developing information systems for a wide range of high-throughput technologies.

Results: ArrayExpress has been online since February 2002, growing exponentially to well over 10,000 hybridizations (as of September 2004). It has been demonstrated that our chosen design and implementation works for databases aimed at storage, access and sharing of high-throughput data.

Availability: The ArrayExpress database is available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/. The software is open source.

Contact: ugis@ebi.ac.uk.