CATdb: a public access to Arabidopsis transcriptome data from the URGV-CATMA platform

CATdb is a free resource available at http://urgv.evry.inra.fr/CATdb that provides public access to a large collection of transcriptome data for Arabidopsis thaliana produced by a single Complete Arabidopsis Transcriptome Micro Array (CATMA) platform. CATMA probes consist of gene-specific sequence tags (GSTs) of 150-500 bp. The v2 version of CATMA contains 24 576 GST probes representing most of the predicted A. thaliana genes, and 615 probes tiling the chloroplastic and mitochondrial genomes. Data in CATdb are entirely processed with the same standardized protocol, from microarray printing to data analyses. CATdb contains the results of 53 projects including 1724 hybridized samples distributed between 13 different organs, 49 different developmental conditions, 45 mutants and 63 environmental conditions. All the data contained in CATdb can be downloaded from the web site and subsets of data can be sorted out and displayed either by keywords, by experiments, genes or lists of genes up to 100. CATdb gives an easy access to the complete description of experiments with a picture of the experiment design.