Transcriptomics and Phylogenetics Applications

The development of microarray technologies and other high-throughput strategies are becoming increasingly important in biology because they permit to monitor expression levels of thousands of genes in only one experiment. To interpret the biology of these genetic profiles, these data must be analysed in the context of the corresponding proteins coded. This means retrieving information about their biological, biochemical or molecular function. Thus, the development of computational tools to compare and analyse these expression profiles in a suitable way for biological interpretation is needed.

Many institutions have already install microarray instrumentation and willing to share and analyze their data with other laboratories. In this context the GRID technology provide security frameworks and programmer's resources in order to share applications and data. In this way will be possible to share computational and storage resources over the Internet. Such solutions allow accessing distributed data where they reside. These requirements could be mandatory in such case where research institution allow data to be accessed by a laboratory network coordinated in a Virtual Organization. Data could be considered virtually local and statistical procedures can be run against them in parallel. Resources are not centrally controlled and the sharing across boundaries – institutional and even national – adds considerable complexity while bringing huge potential benefits in terms of accessible data and computational power.