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

Download the ISA software components

 
ISAcreator ISAcreator configurator
ISAtab validator ISA converter
BII database & web application rISATAB

Overview of the ISA infrastructure

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.

Metadata capture

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.

Mouse over it to see the corresponding software component that fulfils the specific requirement.

Infrastructure
   

copyright ISA team