ISA Infrastructure

about ISA-Tab specifications examples ISA tools overview isacreator isacreator configurator isa validator isa converter bii data management tool bii risatab news team contact communities

The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) Infrastructure is the first pilot-stage freely available software suite that assists in the reporting and local management of experimental metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technologies used, type of measurements) from studies employing one or a combination of technologies; empowers communities to uptake community-defined minimum information checklists and ontologies; facilitates submission to international public repositories of genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics studies. The trend is now for funders and journals to require both that researchers make more of their data public, for example submitting it to public repositories, and that they begin to utilise community-defined open standards, i.e. minimum information checklists and ontologies . The pilot-stage ISA software components will continued to be developed closely with the user communities and jointly with several collaborators. Reading Material	Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.
Focus on the Experimental Metadata Today’s researchers can perform biological, biomedical and environmental studies where the same material is run through one or a wide range of assays, comprising several technologies, in combination. For example, consider a multi-assays study looking at the effect of a compound on liver cells by characterizing the metabolic profile (i.e. by mass spectroscopy), measuring protein and gene expression (i.e. by mass spectrometry and DNA microarrays, respectively), and conducting conventional analysis. The pilot-stage ISA software components assist researchers in the reporting of contextualizing experimental metadata at the appropriate level of granularity, using community-defined minimum information checklists and ontology terms. This will produce richly and comparably annotated studies and enable researchers to correctly interpret the data that result from the assays, and the conclusions drawn. User Requirements and Infrastructure Components The six pilot-stage ISA software components, based on the ISA-Tab format, are designed for local use and can work independently, or as unified system. More details at the ISA tools page. The image below shows the user requirements and our efforts to fulfill them...