Briefs

Feb 3, 2003. Although the marketplace for microarray analysis software has grown increasingly crowded over the last few years, a clear market leader has yet to emerge, according to a recent survey conducted by GenomeWeb LLC, the publisher of BioArray News.

Among commercial tools, users rated Silicon Genetics' GeneSpring as the most popular data analysis tool, (59 out of 167 respondents indicated they had used it), Rosetta Resolver topped the list for usefulness Imaging Research's ArrayStat won out for user-friendliness, and J-Express from Mol-Mine came out on top for price-to-value ratio

Overall, free software is the most popular choice among users, with 69 respondents indicating they use these tools alone, or in combination with other packages. Commercial software not provided by a chip vendor came in second, with 61 users, followed by homemade software (49 users), and software provided by a chip vendor (31).

Within the free software category, Cluster/Treeview from Michael Eisen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was the most popular, while R: Statistics package from Terry Speed at the University of California, Berkeley, had the highest usefulness rating.

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