Asterias

Asterias is a set of web-based applications for the analysis of genomic and proteomic data. Asterias combines Python with R and C/C++, using MPI for parallelization, and aspires to become a standard for high-performance, distributed, web-based bioinformatics and biostatistics applications. Asterias is free software.

Features

Gene expression data normalization, preprocessing, and imputation.
Analysis of differential gene expression
Search for molecular signatures, with survival and (planned) class data.
Search for class prediction and survival prediction models using gene/protein expression data.
(planned) Analysis of tissue array data.
Analisys of aCGH data including calling gains and losses, estimating copy number changes, and (planned) joint analysis of aCGH and expression data.
Functional annotation of analyses results.
Distributed computing using MPI, (planned) UPC and (planned) Grid.

Status

Asterias is fully functional. It is working and publicly available from the main Asterias site. Some of the tools have been running since September 2005 and the latest tools have been publicly accessible since January 2006. During the month of May 2006 Asterias had about 300 hundred usages (these are true usage counts, not webalizer hits), excluding IDConverter, which itself had about 1100 usages during this period.

Who

All of Asterias developers are, as of today, from the Statistical Computing Team at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center. (You can see names and links to individual developers from the specific applications). Expanding this list of developers depends on your joining the project!

Using Asterias

You don't need to install anything. Just go to the application(s) that interest you.

Documentation

For user documentation, please visit the main Asterias applications page, which contains entry points for all user docs.

And this is the entry point for DevelopersDocumentation.

Getting help

Downloading Asterias

Further instructions are provided on the DownloadPage. Configuration is not (yet) straightforward.

Contributing

Asterias would gladly accept new developers and contributors. Further details are provided in the AsteriasDevelopmentPage.

License

Asterias is free software, distributed under the GNU GPL or the Affero GPL, depending on the file. See LicensesPage.