BioConductor

BioConductor is an open source and open development software project for the analysis and comprehension of genomic data.

The project was started in the Fall of 2001 and set out to collect and integrate software for the statistical analysis of wet-lab data in molecular biology. It is based on the statistical programming language R. Its main application is on the analysis of single channel Affymetrix and two (or more channel) cDNA/Oligo microarrays.

The broad goals of the projects are to

• provide access to a wide range of powerful statistical and graphical methods for the analysis of genomic data;
• facilitate the integration of biological metadata in the analysis of experimental data: e.g. literature data from PubMed, annotation data from LocusLink;
• allow the rapid development of extensible, scalable, and interoperable software;
• promote high-quality documentation and reproducible research; and
• provide training in computational and statistical methods for the analysis of genomic data.

External links

• http://www.r-project.org GNU R is a programming language for statistical computing, a free clone of S-PLUS also based on the S programming language
• http://www.bioconductor.org
• http://www.affymetrix.com Affymetrix is a leader in microarray technology, there are others
• The community of the Debian Linux distribution strives towards an automated building of BioConductor packages for their distribution. BioKnoppix andQuantian are projects extending Knoppix that have contributed bootable Debian GNU/Linux CDs providing BioConductor installations.

Source

• Wikipedia article on BioConductor