Tools for Analyzing Microarray Expression Data

Microarray technologies have emerged as key tools forgenomic expression analysis for the purposes of studyingdisease states, identifying drug targets, and profiling time-, tissue- or stage-dependent changes. The resulting volume of data generated necessitates the use of bioinformatics tools to find interesting gene expression patterns, to identify statistically significant changes across experiments, and to provide additional tools relevant to data mining. We have developed a comprehensive workbench solution, GeneSpring™, which (1) comes with an intuitive interface incorpo-rating organized file management, (2) handles data from multiple array formats, (3) includes multiple data display formats, (4) includes a suite of statistical clustering tools, and (5) incorporates automated annotation and cross-referencing. We will discuss the set of algorithms collectively designed to facili-tate gene function identification from large scale genomic expression experiments