"Researchers often have problems trying to reproduce work that others have published because the publishing process often leaves out necessary steps," said Pablo Tamayo, senior computational biologist and manager of cancer genomics informatics at the Broad Institute. "GenePattern allows users to create and share scripts that will reproduce an analysis at the level of detail that researchers require."

In the near future, the Broad scientists plan to integrate additional modules into the package that will extend the scope of GenePattern into sequence analysis, proteomics and metabolomic methods.

Other members of the GenePattern development team include Josh Gould, Charlotte Henson, Jim Lerner, Ted Liefeld, Stefano Monti, Keith Ohm, Ken Ross and Aravind Subramanian. The work was supported by the National Cancer Institute through a grant from the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative of the National Institutes of Health.

GenePattern may be downloaded at broad.mit/cancer/software/genepattern.