Data integration for analyzing gene expression data

Various user groups at the University of Leipzig use microarray technology (mainly from Affymetrix Inc.) for gene expression analysis in their research and are producing several hundreds of experiment a year. To manage the large amounts of data resulting from these experiments, a comprehensive database solution is necessary, in particular to store raw microarray data as well as derived data and to support various analysis forms. Furthermore, annotations from different sources should be integrated with the microarray data to help the users in interpreting detected gene expression patterns. These integration and analysis tasks can be well served by a data warehouse approach to data management which we follow.