A guide to microarray experiments-an open letter to the scientific journals

For microarray experiments, simply defining the appropriate data has been a challenge, because the large quantity of data generated in each experiment and the typical complexity of the ancillary information needed to interpret the results are unlike anything that has yet faced the biological research community. The members of the Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED)1 society have been working over the past few years to solicit community input in developing standards for the publication of DNA microarray data. In December of 2001, we published a commentary in Nature Genetics in which we described MIAME the Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment.2 MIAME is presented as a proposed standard for representation of array data that would be sufficient to allow readers of published reports to replicate the analysis presented and to facilitate the development of novel methods of data analysis by providing access to necessary primary data.