by Dr. Glenn J. Myatt,
Chief Scientific Officer, Leadscope, Inc.
A tutorial on creating a Transcriptomics Assay Metadata, by Dr. Glenn J. Myatt, Chief Scientific Officer, Leadscope, Inc.
The ToxBank data warehouse (https://services.toxbank.net/) has adopted the ISA-tab Universal Data Exchange Format to organize experimental meta data in a consistent manner (http://isatab.sourceforge.net/format.html). The "ISA" represents Investigation, Study and Assay - the three main components of the exchange format.
The following tutorial outlines how to create an assay (specifically a transcriptomics assay). This is performed using the ISAcreator software that has been customized to use in creating investigation archives for theSERUAT-1 cluster (http://www.ideaconsult.net/downloads/ISAcreator.SEURAT/ISAcreator.SEURAT-v1.7.2.zip).
Other tutorials will outline the how to create an investigation (Creating an Investigation Tutorial) and one or more studies (Creating Studies Tutorial). The following tutorial will outline how to document the assay steps, describe the experimental parameter using ontology terms, and link the meta data about the assay to the raw and processed data.