•http://zf-espresso.tuebingen.mpg.de

Zebrafish has quickly established itself as an important model not only for developmental biologists, but also for those studying human disease. To satisfy the growing need for analysis of data from large-scale, high-throughput experiments, Robert Geisler's group at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen has developed an online database for zebrafish expression profiling data — ZF-Espresso.

The database is being developed as part of the ZF-MODELS project, an Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission. The aim of ZF-Espresso is to give biologists access to publicly available expression profiling data. Experiments from different investigators can be compared and combined in a single expression profile. It is also possible to search for genes with similar expression profiles across experiments.

The information is organized under three headings: Select Conditions, Select Probes and Draw Expression Profile. The user can select from a list of experimental conditions and a list of microarray (or qPCR) probes. Because the probes have been mapped to UniGene IDs comparisons can be made across microarray platforms. Line and bar graphs and dot and distribution plots help to visualize expression profiles. The data (from the spreadsheet view) can also be downloaded for further analysis.

ZF-Espresso launched only a couple of months ago. Eventually, it will include all the zebrafish expression profiling data from public repositories. The plan is to add links to external image databases, provide raw and processed data and to add statistical tools for cross-experiment validation. It is based on freely available PHP and MySQL software and will be easily adaptable for other organisms.