Mining for Microarray Gold

The use of high-throughput gene expression analysis technologies, such as microarrays, yields reams of data. Unfortunately, data stemming from competing and alternate technologies is often stored in a variety of formats, making comprehensive analyses difficult. Kirkland, Wash.-based Rosetta Inpharmatics Inc. offers a product that now enables scientists to join all of their gene expression data in a single location, and to mine that data for nuggets of gold unimaginable when the experiments were

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The Rosetta Resolver System, version 2.0, "provides storage, retrieval, and analysis mechanisms for large volumes of gene expression data from a wide variety of technologies," according to Douglas Bassett, senior director of biosoftware products at Rosetta. Thus, it can be used to integrate data from nylon arrays, microarrays, and SAGE experiments, for example. It also provides "powerful statistical algorithms and error models for each technology ... which allow us to predict, based on the past behavior of a certain gene expression platform technology, ... the quality statistics associated with each measurement," says Bassett. This means that the system can determine how much weight to assign each data point in subsequent analyses. The advantage of this approach is that every experiment added to the database increases the value of the entire database. Thus, whereas it was once common to analyze only a subset of the limited number of datasets stored in ...

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