Broad Institute researchers release enhanced GenePattern software

Recently, researchers at Broad Institute released GenePattern 1.2, an enhanced version of the GenePattern microarray analysis package that is freely available to the scientific community

The software offers an efficient, flexible microarray analysis tool that allows biomedical researchers across disciplines to perform custom gene expression analysis experiments, record and replay analyses, and use tools from many different software sources within a single interface. Major new features of GenePattern 1.2 include:

  • Online module repository. A repository at the Broad Institute website allows users to identify, and select for automatic download, the modules they wish to import into the GenePattern system. This feature allows easy and automatic update of GenePattern as new modules are released.
  • Java Programming Environment. A programming library allows Java programmers to call any GenePattern module from within a Java application. Users can also save analysis pipelines as Java applications.
  • Batch analyses. A user can select a folder instead of a single file as input to a module, and the analysis will run on all of the files within that folder.

The GenePattern 1.2 software and a comprehensive list of new features and fixes can be found on the GenePattern website.

Currently, over 200 institutions, including more than 30 pharma-biotech companies, across 35 countries worldwide, are using the software package.

GenePattern was developed with funding from the National Cancer Institute through a grant from the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative of the National Institutes of Health. This grant was awarded to principal investigator Jill Mesirov, chief informatics officer and director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Organization at Broad.

The Broad Institute (rhymes with "code") is known officially as The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute. It is a research collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and its hospitals and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The Broad mission is to create comprehensive tools for genomic medicine, make them freely available to scientists worldwide and pioneer their application to understand and treat disease.