Background#R##N#Tissue Microarrays (TMAs) have emerged as a powerful tool for examining the distribution of marker molecules in hundreds of different tissues displayed on a single slide. TMAs have been used successfully to validate candidate molecules discovered in gene array experiments. Like gene expression studies, TMA experiments are data intensive, requiring substantial information to interpret, replicate or validate. Recently, an open access Tissue Microarray Data Exchange Specification has been released that allows TMA data to be organized in a self-describing XML document annotated with well-defined common data elements. While this specification provides sufficient information for the reproduction of the experiment by outside research groups, its initial description did not contain instructions or examples of actual implementations, and no implementation studies have been published. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the TMA Data Exchange Specification is implemented in a prostate cancer TMA.
['Jules J. Berman', 'Milton W. Datta', 'Andre Kajdacsy-Balla', 'Jonathan Melamed', 'Jan M. Orenstein', 'Kevin K. Dobbin', 'Ashok Patel', 'Rajiv Dhir', 'Michael J. Becich']
The tissue microarray data exchange specification: implementation by the Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource