Applications in Bioinformatics: Integration of Web Services for Microarray Analysis

The completion of the human genome project has revolutionized the field of Biology. Vast amounts of information have been yielded which in turn requires high-throughput and large scale technologies to manipulate the data. DNA microarray technology is emerging as a powerful way to identify genetic disorders, drug discovery and toxicology, mutations, disease diagnosis etc. The potential applications for microarray analysis almost seem limitless. It allows an entire set of genes to be evaluated at once rather than looking at the physiological changes of one gene at a time. Many tools are commercially available to analyse the data from microarray experiments. The web service which is used by the application serves as an interface and uses the Entrez programming utilities to query the Entrez databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The web service would be used as a middle tier to a identify specific gene or protein information from the gene list derived from microarray experiments. This application can eventually be linked to the software which analyses the microarray data. The application was developed using the .NET framework. The web service and the client web application were developed using ASP.NET in C#. From a geneID, the client program requests the web service to get the gene or protein information. The returned XML contains a HTML string which is displayed to the client.