Asterias: integrated analysis of expression and aCGH data using an open-source, web-based, parallelized software suite

Asterias (http://www.asterias.info) is an opensource, web-based, suite for the analysis of gene expression and aCGH data. Asterias implements validated statistical methods, and most of the applications use parallel computing, which permits taking advantage of multicore CPUs and computing clusters. Access to, and further analysis of, additional biological information and annotations (PubMed references, Gene Ontology terms, KEGG and Reactome pathways) are available either for individual genes (from clickable links in tables and figures) or sets of genes. These applications cover from array normalization to imputation and preprocessing, differential gene expression analysis, class and survival prediction and aCGH analysis. The source code is available, allowing for extention and reuse of the software. The links and analysis of additional functional information, parallelization of computation and open-source availability of the code make Asterias a unique suite that can exploit features specific to web-based environments
Funding was provided by Fundación de Investigación Médica Mutua Madrileña and Project TIC2003-09331- C02-02 of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC). R.D.U. is partially supported by the Ramón y Cajal programme of the Spanish MEC. Applications are running on clusters of machines purchased with funds from the RTICCC from the Spanish FIS. Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by the Fundación de Investigación Médica Mutua Madrileña