What is MIAME? Do I need to care about MIAME?
A13. MIAME describes how data should be prepared for journals such as Nature, Science, Cell and The Lancet. It was originally designed to cater for published information, but has evolved to become the standard by which all microarray data should be handled and stored. Some journals, such as those mentioned now make compliance with MIAME and deposition of data with at least one of the two main microarray repositories (ArrayExpress at The European Bioinformatics Institute [EBI] and GEO at The National Centre for Biotechnology Information [NCBI]) a prerequisite for publication. Consequently MIAME is of prime importance. For small research groups and projects the data submission tools at the two centres (eg, MIAMEExpress at EBI) are workable solutions. For larger groups and research projects, data entry to the repositories using these tools are slow and inefficient (much user interaction is required), and these repositories are only for data for publication. Researchers are advised to inve
