BioMart and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) Data Portal

BioMart is a freely available, open source, federated database system that provides a unified access to disparate, geographically distributed data sources. It is designed to be data agnostic and platform independent, such that existing databases can easily be incorporated into the BioMart framework. BioMart allows databases hosted on different servers to be presented seamlessly to users, facilitating collaborative projects between different research groups. BioMart contains several levels of query optimization to efficiently manage large data sets and offers a diverse selection of graphical user interfaces and application programming interfaces to ensure that queries can be performed in whatever manner is most convenient for the user. The software has now been adopted by a large number of different biological databases spanning a wide range of data types and providing a rich source of annotation available to bioinformaticians and biologists alike. Database URL: http://www.biomart.org

Source: BioMart: a data federation framework for large collaborative projects. Zhang J, Haider S, Baran J, Cros A, Guberman JM, Hsu J, Liang Y, Yao L, Kasprzyk A (arek.kasprzyk@gmail.com). Database (Oxford). 2011 Sep 19;2011:bar038.

Free article available at :

 http://database.oxfordjournals.org/content/2011/bar038.full.pdf+html

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) is a collaborative effort to characterize genomic abnormalities in 50 different cancer types. To make this data available, the ICGC has created the ICGC Data Portal. Powered by the BioMart software, the Data Portal allows each ICGC member institution to manage and maintain its own databases locally, while seamlessly presenting all the data in a single access point for users. The Data Portal currently contains data from 24 cancer projects, including ICGC, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Johns Hopkins University, and the Tumor Sequencing Project. It consists of 3478 genomes and 13 cancer types and subtypes. Available open access data types include simple somatic mutations, copy number alterations, structural rearrangements, gene expression, microRNAs, DNA methylation and exon junctions. Additionally, simple germline variations are available as controlled access data. The Data Portal uses a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) to offer researchers multiple ways to quickly and easily search and analyze the available data. The web interface can assist in constructing complicated queries across multiple data sets. Several application programming interfaces are also available for programmatic access. Here we describe the organization, functionality, and capabilities of the ICGC Data Portal. Database URL: http://dcc.icgc.org

Source: International Cancer Genome Consortium Data Portal--a one-stop shop for cancer genomics data. Zhang J, Baran J, Cros A, Guberman JM, Haider S, Hsu J, Liang Y, Rivkin E, Wang J, Whitty B, Wong-Erasmus M, Yao L, Kasprzyk A (arek.kasprzyk@gmail.com). Database (Oxford). 2011 Sep 19;2011:bar026.

Free article available at:

http://database.oxfordjournals.org/content/2011/bar026.full.pdf+html