ICROARRA Y Technologie s Technologie s Short Technical Repor t MarC-V: A Spreadsheet-Based Tool for Analysis , Normalization, and Visualization of Single cDNA Microarray Experiment s

The comprehensive analysis and visua l ization of data extracted from cDNA microarrays can be a time-consuming an d error-prone process that becomes increa s ingly tedious with increased number of gen e elements on a particular microarray. Wit h the increasingly large number of gene el e ments on today’s microarrays, analysis tool s must be developed to meet this challenge . Here, we present MarC-V, a Microsof t ®E x ce l ® spreadsheet tool with Visual Basi c ® macros to automate much of the visualiz a tion and calculation involved in the analysi s process while providing the familiarity an d flexibility of Excel. Automated features o f this tool include ( i) lower-bound threshol d ing, (i i) data normalization, (ii i) generatio n of ratio frequency distribution plots, (i v ) generation of scatter plots color-coded b y expression level, ( v) ratio scoring based o n intensity measurements, (v i) filtering of dat a based on expression level or specific gen e interests, and (vi i) exporting data for subs e quent multi-array analysis. MarC-V als o has an importing function included fo r GenePi x ®results (GPR) raw data files .