Sharma-Oates, A, Quirke, P orcid.org/0000-0002-3597-5444 and Westhead, DR orcid.org/0000-0002-0519-3820 (2005) TmaDB: a repository for tissue microarray data. BMC Bioinformatics, 6 (218). pp.218-pp.218. ISSN 1471-2105
Abstract
Background: Tissue microarray (TMA) technology has been developed to facilitate large, genome-scale molecular pathology studies. This technique provides a high-throughput method for analyzing a large cohort of clinical specimens in a single experiment thereby permitting the parallel analysis of molecular alterations ( at the DNA, RNA, or protein level) in thousands of tissue specimens. As a vast quantity of data can be generated in a single TMA experiment a systematic approach is required for the storage and analysis of such data.
Description: To analyse TMA output a relational database ( known as TmaDB) has been developed to collate all aspects of information relating to TMAs. These data include the TMA construction protocol, experimental protocol and results from the various immunocytological and histochemical staining experiments including the scanned images for each of the TMA cores. Furthermore the database contains pathological information associated with each of the specimens on the TMA slide, the location of the various TMAs and the individual specimen blocks ( from which cores were taken) in the laboratory and their current status i.e. if they can be sectioned into further slides or if they are exhausted. TmaDB has been designed to incorporate and extend many of the published common data elements and the XML format for TMA experiments and is therefore compatible with the TMA data exchange specifications developed by the Association for Pathology Informatics community. Finally the design of the database is made flexible such that TMA experiments from several types of cancer can be stored in a single database, which incorporates the national minimum data set required for pathology reports supported by the Royal College of Pathologists (UK).
Conclusion: TmaDB will provide a comprehensive repository for TMA data such that a large number of results from the numerous immunostaining experiments can be efficiently compared for each of the TMA cores. This will allow a systematic, large-scale comparison of tumour samples to facilitate the identification of gene products of clinical importance such as therapeutic or prognostic markers. In addition this work will contribute to the establishment of a standard for reporting TMA data analogous to MIAME in the description of microarray data
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2005 Sharma-Oates et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | cancer |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Molecular and Cellular Biology (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Medicine (Leeds) > Leeds Institute of Cancer and Pathology (LICAP) > Pathology & Tumour Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Archana Oates |
Date Deposited: | 13 Mar 2006 |
Last Modified: | 01 Mar 2019 13:11 |
Published Version: | http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/218 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | London: BioMedCentral |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/1471-2105-6-218 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:851 |