As a graduate student, Eric Olson learned something about DNA microarrays: Biochip data management can be vexing. His graduate adviser abandoned a number of microarray experiments because it was too difficult to manage the data using the software supplied with the arrays. Now Olson is director of science for a company that is trying to change that.
Seattle-based VizX Labs offers a Web-based, platform-independent microarray data analysis package called GeneSifter. Net™. Originally developed by NeoBase, a start-up company formed by a group of University of Washington biologists who were frustrated with conventional microarray analysis software, GeneSifter. Net is designed to be accessible to researchers with little computer expertise. Olson, one of the program's developers, explains that he and his colleagues found array analysis software too complicated to use and "not worth the time and effort" it took to gain the level of computer literacy required to work with it. Olson ...
