bioinformatic tools for inferring functional information from plant microarray data tools for the first steps生物信息学工具推断功能信息从植物微阵列数据工具的第一步骤.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Plant Genomics Volume 2008, Article ID 147563, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2008/147563 Review Article Bioinformatic Tools for Inferring Functional Information from Plant Microarray Data: Tools for the First Steps Grier P. Page and Issa Coulibaly Department of Biostatistics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1665 University Blvd Ste 327, Birmingham, AL 35294-0022, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Grier P. Page, gpage@ Received 2 November 2007; Accepted 7 May 2008 Recommended by Gary Skuse Microarrays are a very powerful tool for quantifying the amount of RNA in samples; however, their ability to query essentially every gene in a genome, which can number in the tens of thousands, presents analytical and interpretative problems. As a result, a variety of software and web-based tools have been developed to help with these issues. This article highlights and reviews some of the tools for the first steps in the analysis of a microarray study. We have tried for a balance between free and commercial systems. We have organized the tools by topics including image processing tools (Section 2), power analysis tools (Section 3), image analysis tools (Section 4), database tools (Section 5), databases of functional information (Section 6), annotation tools (Section 7), statistical and data mining tools (Section 8), and dissemination tools (Section 9). Copyright © 2008 G. P. Page and I. Coulibaly. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. INTRODUCTION microarray studies. Image analysis tools (