<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>Conception, design, and implementation of cDNA microarray experiments present a
variety of bioinformatics challenges for biologists and computational scientists. The multiple
stages of data acquisition and analysis have motivated the design of Expresso, a
system for microarray experiment management. Salient aspects of Expresso include
support for clone replication and randomized placement; automatic gridding, extraction of
expression data from each spot, and quality monitoring; flexible methods of combining
data from individual spots into information about clones and functional categories; and the
use of inductive logic programming for higher-level data analysis and mining. The
development of Expresso is occurring in parallel with several generations of microarray
experiments aimed at elucidating genomic responses to drought stress in loblolly pine
seedlings. The current experimental design incorporates 384 pine cDNAs replicated and
randomly placed in two specific microarray layouts. We describe the design of Expresso as
well as results of analysis with Expresso that suggest the importance of molecular
chaperones and membrane transport proteins in mechanisms conferring successful
adaptation to long-term drought stress.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2002 Jun; 3(3):226-243