Figure 1.

A search interface that uses ontologies to find gene expression patterns. A search query retrieves both in situ hybridisation (ISH) and cDNA microarray gene expression patterns that can be browsed using a hierarchial ontology tree (1). In this example, ISH entries are ordered by genes (gene ontology terms), whilst array data is ordered by tissue type (anatomy ontology terms). Whilst original ISH images (2) are screened visually using a slide sorter, array data (3) is used to determine gene expression trends between samples. In this example, the array series represents a time series of organ development and could be used to verify ISH findings. ISH and array datasets of interest can be saved in a folder entitled ‘My Collections’ (4) and can be accessed at a later time.