An Application of a Service-oriented System to Support ArrayAnnotation in Custom Chip Design for Epigenomic Analysis

We present the implementation of an application using caGrid, which is the service-oriented Grid software infrastructure of the NCI cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™), to support design and analysis of custom microarray experiments in the study of epigenetic alterations in cancer. The design and execution of these experiments requires synthesis of information from multiple data types and datasets. In our implementation, each data source is implemented as a caGrid Data Service, and analytical resources are wrapped as caGrid Analytical Services. This service-based implementation has several advantages. A backend resource can be modified or upgraded, without needing to change other components in the application. A remote resource can be added easily, since resources are not required to be collected in a centralized infrastructure.