GenePattern Announces Module Archive for Bioinformatics Community

By Bio-IT World Staff 

September 28, 2011 | The creators of GenePattern, winner of a Bio-IT World Best Practices Award in 2005, have just launched GParc, the GenePattern Archive, as a place to share modules and help grow the GenePattern community.  

GenePattern is a powerful genomic analysis platform developed at the Broad Institute that provides access to more than 150 tools for gene expression analysis, proteomics, SNP analysis, flow cytometry, RNA-seq analysis, and common data processing tasks. A Web-based interface provides easy access to these tools and allows the creation of multi-step analysis pipelines that enable reproducible in silico research.
The GenePattern software, first released in 2004, currently has over 20,000 users. “One of the key benefits of GenePattern is the ease with which users can extend GenePattern's functionality by adding their own tools to a GenePattern server,” said Michael Reich, Director of Cancer Informatics at the Broad Institute. “Over the years, many users have created their own GenePattern modules and the GenePattern team has received a number of requests to host these modules so they may be of use to the world wide genomics community.” 

The GenePattern Archive allows users to share modules they’ve made with the bioinformatics community. The archive is patterned after similar archives for Perl and R.  

“In the short time since being announced, GParc has received submissions from GenePattern module developers in organizations from California to Australia,” says Reich 

All GenePattern users are encouraged to view the contributions of their colleagues and invited to use GParc to share their modules with the rest of the world.