Storage and processing of transcriptome data via the web tool CORNET

  To make data mining and integration in Arabidopsis easily accessible to a broad audience, we developed the tool CORNET. Publicly available microarray data were collected in a relational database, and this database was linked to a web tool for co-expression analysis. The current database includes all data from microarray experiments performed on the Affymetrix ATH1 array (Redman et al. 2004), accounting for about 1,200 experiments (~ 3000 arrays). Besides the classic ATH1 array was also recently developed a whole genome tiling array spanning the entire genome (Stolc et al. 2005). The amount of data from an experiment with this tiling array is much larger and requires a storage expansion. Moreover, we opt for the purchase of a dedicated application server with sufficient capacity both in terms of CPUs and in terms of memory. Overall, we are forced to expand the existing computer infrastructure in the future to incorporate the rapidly growing volumes of data from microarray tiling array experiments in our database and to make this data analysis for co-expression available to a wide audience.