The Informatics and Data Coordination Center for the CardioGenomics PGA is housed at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Children's Hospital, Boston and serves as a resource for all components of the PGA. In additon, the CardioGenomics PGA makes use of PhysioNet to house all of the physiologic signals obtained through the Mouse Physiology and Imaging Center.

The Informatics and Data Coordination Center has three principal aims:

• To establish a web-accessible portal by which data produced by the CardioGenomics PGA can be entered, annotated and analyzed
• To develop a "noise aware" Benchmark Data Set (BDS) for normal cardiovascular tissue and obtain expression data from humans with one of several cardiovascular diseases (within the scope of the CardioGenomics PGA). The BDS will include a variety of expression data sets obtained by the Animal Models Center from wild-type mice at various stages of development and with several mouse models with gain and loss of function in genes known to be involved in cardiovascular function. The BDS will also include myocardial expression data sets from unaffected humans at various developmental stages.
• To generate hypotheses using clustering and classification bioinformatics techniques to identify functional dependencies.

Software Tools:

• unChip- a web-based interface that allows you to query a database providing information on Affymetrix® accession numbers
• MedGene Database (developed by the Harvard Institute of Proteomics)
• chipperDB - an experimental RNA Expression and Annotation Query Server, written by Eric Tsung, Alberto Riva, and Alvin Kuo, Children's Hospital Informatics Program. To use chipperDB to query RNA chip data generated by CardioGenomicsprojects, log in as user: "guest-cg", password: "guest-cg".

Participants