About Us
What is EMERALD?
This European Union Framework Program 6 Coordination Action (CA) will serve to establish and disseminate quality metrics (QM), microarray standards and best laboratory practices throughout the European microarray community. This will allow microarray data production governed by QA/QC, significantly enhancing the quality of microarray data and setting a precedent for other array-based technologies. Over the last 15 years microarray technology has proved the method of choice for capturing molecular biological data in a massively parallel fashion. Data quality and meta-data (documentation) are key to all microarray data generation and analysis, to ensure that maximum information can be extracted from the data. Very early in the development of microarray-based transcript profiling the microarray community has realised the importance of structured documentation accompanying microarray data. The need to reanalyse and reproduce data spawned a ‘grassroots movement’, now the MGED Society that established guidelines for experiment description (MIAME) and a structured data exchange model (MAGE-ML). MGED initiatives have predominantly been focused on data context, and has only recently been extended to included data content. Quality and integrity of microarray data compendia (e.g. in ArrayExpress) are major determinants for information extraction model building and high quality data will be one of the pillars of systems biology. This CA is designed to structure and amalgamate ongoing efforts across Europe, in close association with MGED and the External RNA Control Consortium (ERCC).
Approaches and measurable targets
This Coordination Action brings together a consortium comprising many different stakeholders of microarray technology. This includes the main research and innovation operators involved in the development of microarray standards and quality metrics (EBI, LGC, IRMM), the stakeholders in the data production process (core facilities, companies, technology innovators: NTNU, BRC, UU), and experts in information extraction and data modelling (NTNU, VIB, CIPF). Some partners also play important roles in MGED or ERCC. Central is the implementation of appropriate QA/QC practice in the microarray data production process.
Essentially our approaches include 10 logical steps:
I. Establishing quality metrics for quality control.
II. The development of Normalisation and Transformation Ontology to capture the data pre-processing information.
III. The organisation of the European Microarray Stakeholders community.
IV. Structuring of communication and information exchange.
V. Microarray community agreement on ‘best laboratory practices’ for QA.
VI. The assessment of microarray standards for QC.
VII.Validation of QA/QC by key microarray laboratory volunteers.
VIII. Validation of benefits of QA/QC on data compendium modelling.
IX. Dissemination of the results to the microarray community.
X. Extrapolation and application to new technology development
Coordination and dissemination activities
Coordination activities are defined in six main areas relevant for microarray analysis: Development of quality metrics, ontology for data description, implementation of standards and best practices, selection of standards that are candidates for European Reference Materials, impact on data information content, and dissemination of QA/QC principles to novel experimental high-throughput techniques for the different -omics domains. These activities are made up of seven work packages (WP).
More information about EMERALD can be found from our leaflet, that can be downladed here.