The research community's rapid acceptance of microarrays notwithstanding, technical challenges remain. Biochip developers continue to grapple with these issues while upgrading their offerings and adding new product lines in response to research trends. Perhaps the biggest challenge to microarray technology is standardization--ensuring that data collected from different microarray platforms can be accurately compared. Compounding this problem is the absence of a unified "language" for microarray analysis that would ease the exchange of microarray data between different groups. "There's very little consensus on how to analyze microarray data," says John Ambroziak of MWG Biotech in High Point, NC. Researchers are "trying to establish standards [to get] everybody speaking the same language."
The Microarray Gene Expression Data Society (www.mged.org) has developed guidelines for the publication of DNA microarray data.1 These standards--collectively dubbed MIAME, for Minimal Information About a Microarray Experiment--are meant as a provisional solution to the broader problem of standardizing microarray ...
