The open source ISA metadata tracking tools facilitates standards compliant collection, curation, local management and reuse of datasets in an increasingly diverse set of life science domains. Built around the ‘Investigation’ (the project context), ‘Study’ (a unit of research) and ‘Assay’ (analytical measurement) metadata categories, the tools are designed to manage studies employing one or a combination of technologies.
Targeted to experimentalists,curators and developers , the ISA tools include the:
- an extensible, hierarchical structure that focuses on the description of the experimental metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technology and measurement types, sample-to-data relationships);
- acts to create, edit, store and serve ISA-Tab files, empowering researchers to uptake community-defined minimum information checklists and ontologies, where required;
- converts ISA-Tab files to a growing number of other related formats for submission to a growing number of international public repositories endorsing the tools, ENA (genomics), PRIDE (proteomics) and ArrayExpress (transcriptomics).
Read this fact sheet describing the ISA software components. Contact us if you are interested in having a demo to best use the tools or extend them for your local needs.
A Commentary in Nature Genetics presents the ISA Commons community! More...
The NCI caBIG® Nanotechnology Working Group extends the ISA-Tab for nanotechnology applications More...
The EU ToxBank project is working to use the ISA-Tab format More...
ISA down under: Bioplatforms Australia and CSIRO endorse the ISA infrastructure! More...
The LINCS consortium is beginning to use the ISA-Tab format. More...
BGI releases updated bioinformatics software and the GigaDB based on ISA infrastructure. More...
ISA-Tab adopted by the SNRNASM annotation guidelines. More...
The EBI public metabolomics repository, MetaboLights, will be fully based on ISA. More...


