E-MAAS
Extensible MicroArray Analysis System (EMAAS)
The EMAAS project, based at Imperial College, London has developed a distributed e-support system for microarray data analysis and management.
The initial reasoning for the project was to extend the facilities and expertise at the Bioinformatics Support Serviceof the college for supporting researchers in a range microarray analyses, manage their data, and to and integrate data management and analysis tools being developed in the Microarray Centre and elsewhere within Imperial, using GRID enabled-technologies. This required interdisciplinary collaboration between these groups and The London e-Scicence Centre in the Department of Computing.
The result of this project to date is a portal system providing simple, robust access to up-to-date resources for microarray data storage and analysis, combined with an integrated system to optimise user support and training using these amenities.The EMAAS framework allows users to import microarray data from several sources both local and public inlcuding GEO and the Affymetrix data repositories CELSIUS and MiMiR.
Users are able to perform standard Affymetrix microarray data analysis on both the 3' and Exon arrays. The analysis pipeline includes data pre-processing, quality assessment, statistical and functional enrichment analsyis, all through a single easy to use Rich Inernet Application web interface, with each step of the analysis being tracked and stored to a centralised database.
The EMAAS interface also enables distance support to users both in the form of video tutorials and using live screen feeds via the web conferencing tool EVO.
A number of analysis packages, including R-Bioconductor and Affymetrix Power Tools have been integrated on the server side and are available programmatically through the Postgres-PLR library or on local grid compute clusters. As are several distributed resources, including the functional annotation tool DAVID and the the gene information tool GeneCards.