Table 1: A variety of public, high-throughput gene expression and genomic hybridization data resources
This list is provided to show the wide variety of public, high-through put gene expression and genomic hybridization data currently available in a wide variety of formats. It is in no way meant to be comprehensive. Primary resources (1º)publish in-house data, and secondary resources (2º) publish both in-house and collaborator data, while tertiary resources (3º) accept data to be published from third, unrelated parties. To our knowledge, GEO is the only tertiary resource of this kind in operation.
SUBMISSIONS
Two modes of communication are available for new and update submissions, interactive or direct deposit. The interactive web form interface route is straightforward and most suited foroccasional submissions of a relatively small number of samples. Bulk submissions of large data sets may be rapidly incorporated into GEO via direct deposit of files in the simple omnibus format (SOFT). SOFT is a line based, ASCII text format which allows for the representation of multiple GEO platforms, samples and series in one file. In SOFT, meta data appear as label-value pairs and are associated with the tab-delimited text tables of platforms and samples. SOFT has been designed for easy manipulation by readily available line-scanning soft-ware and may be quite readily produced from, and imported into,spreadsheet, database and analysis software. More information about SOFT and the submission process is available from the GEO web site.Submissions may be held privately for a maximum of 6 months; this policy allows data release concordant with manuscript publication. Such submissions are given a final accession number, which may be quoted in the publication. At this point, the submissions are not curated, but are human scanned to assure that the minimal basic requirements are met.It is entirely up to the submitter to make the data useful toothers by using the standard column headers in the data table,and providing adequate supplementary information.