Integrated Architecture for Functional Genomic Measurements

Successful use of microarray technology for the investigation of biological systems requires an integrated informatics infrastructure. The objective of this research and development effort is to specify such an integrated informatics architecture to support biological research and discovery efforts being conducted throughout the Department of Defense's (DoD) Medical Research and Materiel Command (MRMC). This next generation integrated architecture, when implemented, will dramatically improve research quality and decrease time to biological discovery. No existing commercial solution provides as complete or as integrated a solution for the advanced analysis of array functional genomic measurements as the one defined here. Current commercial or academic solutions are mostly limited to basic analysis of array data to determine differential expression and do not practically address the advanced analysis of array data to uncover sets of associations between genes. Most of these solutions require scientists to spend their time tediously feeding data from one analytical or visualization component to the next to complete data analyses. Moreover, no commercial solutions exist to assist scientists in the critically important task of assembling testable models from the results of these advanced analyses. The architecture specified in this report overcomes all of these deficiencies.