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Biomedical subjects

Catherine A Ball

Publications and source records attributed to Catherine A Ball.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

The Stanford Microarray Database: data access and quality assessment tools.

The Stanford Microarray Database (SMD; http://genome-www.stanford.edu/microarray/) serves as a microarray research database for Stanford investigators and their collaborators. In addition, SMD functions as a resource for the entire scientific community, by making freely available all of its source code and providing full public access to data published by SMD users, along with many tools to explore and analyze those data. SMD currently provides public access to data from 3500 microarrays, including data from 85 publications, and this total is increasing rapidly. In this article, we describe some of SMD's newer tools for accessing public data, assessing data quality and for data analysis.

Animals↗

Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) provides secondary gene annotation using the Gene Ontology (GO).

The Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) resources, ranging from genetic and physical maps to genome-wide analysis tools, reflect the scientific progress in identifying genes and their functions over the last decade. As emphasis shifts from identification of the genes to identification of the role of their gene products in the cell, SGD seeks to provide its users with annotations that will allow relationships to be made between gene products, both within Saccharomyces cerevisiae and across species. To this end, SGD is annotating genes to the Gene Ontology (GO), a structured representation of biological knowledge that can be shared across species. The GO consists of three separate ontologies describing molecular function, biological process and cellular component. The goal is to use published information to associate each characterized S.cerevisiae gene product with one or more GO terms from each of the three ontologies. To be useful, this must be done in a manner that allows accurate associations based on experimental evidence, modifications to GO when necessary, and careful documentation of the annotations through evidence codes for given citations. Reaching this goal is an ongoing process at SGD. For information on the current progress of GO annotations at SGD and other participating databases, as well as a description of each of the three ontologies, please visit the GO Consortium page at http://www.geneontology.org. SGD gene associations to GO can be found by visiting our site at http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Saccharomyces/.

Animals↗

Microarray databases: standards and ontologies.

A single microarray can provide information on the expression of tens of thousands of genes. The amount of information generated by a microarray-based experiment is sufficiently large that no single study can be expected to mine each nugget of scientific information. As a consequence, the scale and complexity of microarray experiments require that computer software programs do much of the data processing, storage, visualization, analysis and transfer. The adoption of common standards and ontologies for the management and sharing of microarray data is essential and will provide immediate benefit to the research community.

Database Management Systems↗

Identification of genes periodically expressed in the human cell cycle and their expression in tumors.

The genome-wide program of gene expression during the cell division cycle in a human cancer cell line (HeLa) was characterized using cDNA microarrays. Transcripts of >850 genes showed periodic variation during the cell cycle. Hierarchical clustering of the expression patterns revealed coexpressed groups of previously well-characterized genes involved in essential cell cycle processes such as DNA replication, chromosome segregation, and cell adhesion along with genes of uncharacterized function. Most of the genes whose expression had previously been reported to correlate with the proliferative state of tumors were found herein also to be periodically expressed during the HeLa cell cycle. However, some of the genes periodically expressed in the HeLa cell cycle do not have a consistent correlation with tumor proliferation. Cell cycle-regulated transcripts of genes involved in fundamental processes such as DNA replication and chromosome segregation seem to be more highly expressed in proliferative tumors simply because they contain more cycling cells. The data in this report provide a comprehensive catalog of cell cycle regulated genes that can serve as a starting point for functional discovery. The full dataset is available at http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Human-CellCycle/HeLa/.

Cell Cycle↗