Addressing the biomedical informatics needs of a microarray laboratory in a clinical microbiology context

For an effective integration of microarray-based technologies in clinical settings a number of contributions from biomedical informatics technologies and techniques are needed to facilitate the improvement of the phases of experimental design, image analysis, data management, annotation, and analysis. In this communication we briefly present the state-of-the-art in the application of biomedical informatics to laboratories conducting microarray experiments and how our unit is coping with these requirements imposed by the routine clinical work of the National Centre of Microbiology, a reference laboratory for the Spanish Health System.