Installation of the Stanford Microarray Database Package at the University of Tennessee

Mr. Bob Hillhouse, Manager, UT Web Services

The Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) package is a web-based utility for the storage, retrieval and analysis of microarray data. It uses Oracle for storage, Perl for scripting and C code for analysis. The package is an on-going project of the Department of Genetics at Stanford. Currently, Stanford houses more than ten thousand individual microarray experiments and stores more than 350 million rows of data.

Stanford makes the source code for SMD available for free but doesn’t host data from outside institutions. Consequently, Web Services thought it an ideal application to install locally here at the University of Tennessee. Currently, most UT researchers store their microarray data on desktop PCs. While this may be a manageable state of affairs now, it will not remain so as microarray experiments become more popular. In addition, we hope that having a local repository of massive amounts of biological data will give UT computer scientists grist to develop new algorithms and achieve faster computational speeds. It also our goal to provide researches with leverage in obtaining grants by supporting the data warehousing and data mining services required for analysis. Ultimately, we see SMD evolving as a teaching tool as well, providing students hands-on experience with bioinformatics and database curation.