Microarrays have revolutionized biology, so it is little wonder that much attention has been devoted to their design and analysis. But if it is difficult to analyse single microarray experiments, what about cross-experiment comparisons? TIGR has risen to the challenge of cross-referencing mouse, rat and human microarray expression data in the RESOURCERER database. Given that these rodents are important models of human development and disease, such comparisons are valuable for studies of human gene function.
The RESOURCERER is a database that allows you to do pairwise comparisons between 43 expression microarray resources (20 from mouse, 15 from human and 8 from rat) that have been generated on various platforms (such as cDNA or oligonucleotide arrays) by both academic and commercial labs. For example, you can compare a mouse cDNA data set to one generated from a mouse oligonucleotide array or from a human U95 GeneChip™. You can choose to view information that is shared between data sets or that is unique to one, or the other. The output of such comparisons is a table that provides information on each array element. This information includes GenBank and LocusLink identifiers, links to mammalian orthologues, and to Gene Ontology terms based on TIGR annotations. Finally, you can also search the database using GenBank accession numbers.
RESOURCERER harbours a wealth of information and has the potential to contain further data sets. Even if you are not a computational analysis aficionado it is worth a visit — the web site is very clear, with step-by-step instructions.
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Skipper, M. A bit of micro magic. Nat Rev Genet 3, 646 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg899
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg899
