A database for management of gene expression data in situ.

Motivation: To create a spatiotemporal atlas of Drosophila segmentation gene expression at cellular resolution.

Results: The expression of segmentation genes plays a crucial role in the establishment of the Drosophila body plan. Using the IBM DB2 Relational Database Management System we have designed and implemented the FlyEx database. FlyEx contains 2832 images of 14 segmentation gene expression patterns obtained from 954 embryos and 2,073,662 quantitative data records. The averaged data is available for most of segmentation genes at eight time points. FlyEx supports operations on images of gene expression patterns. The database can be used to examine the quality of data, analyze the dynamics of formation of segmentation gene expression domains, as well as estimate the variability of gene expression patterns. We also provide the capability to download data of interest.

Availability: http://urchin.spbcas.ru/flyex, http://flyex.ams.sunysb.edu/flyex