There are many gene expression analysis tools varying from basic Excel-based spreadsheets to high-end tools sold by bioinformatics software companies. However TIGR is in a unique situation where they need specialized software built to handle the high demands of their internal research team. Also as part of TIGR’s charter they wanted to offer a platform to the microarray community to act as a catalyst for new discoveries and better utilization of a researchers time.
TIGR
had already built the first version of TIGR MEV earlier in 2001 and it was being used internally with success. DataNaut used this version as a starting point for development and after all the best documentation is the source code. The new version of TIGR MEV was to keep the existing user interface look-n-feel but all of the underlying code would be re-written to be object-oriented and expose a programmatic framework for developing visualization and analysis plug-ins.
TIGR
MEV is made up of the following components:
Client application – written in Java the application is used to manage and analyze experiment data and visualize results. The application is available in a standalone version that runs algorithms locally or remotely on the computational grid.
Computational grid – a cluster of computers that run TIGR MEV analysis algorithms. The grid is implemented using Parallel Virtual Machine a clustering toolkit.
Communications gateway – written in Java the gateway is a conduit to the TIGR MEV computational grid.
TIGR MEV is an open source bioinformatics system used for computational microarray analysis. Portions of
this software were developed by DataNaut Inc.; however, all rights and title in and to this software
are owned and retained by The Institute for Genomic Research. If you are interested in obtaining the
software visit the TIGR web site.
DataNaut provides software development consulting services with extensive expertise with microarray
technologies. Organizations that are interested in using DataNaut consulting services or having
TIGR MEV customized for specific research applications can send email to info@datanaut.com.
