Microarrays are not trivial to produce in individual research laboratories since set-up costs (in terms of reagents, equipment and trained personnel) are high and quality control issues are complex. While there are commercial sources of pre-made microarrays from several vendors, they can be expensive if large-scale experiments involving hundreds of arrays are envisaged. Similarly, the availability of custom in situ synthesized arrays, while extremely flexible, can again be expensive. Thus the only avenue available at present for most academic and small biotech labs who are limited in terms of their budgets is to rely on core academic facilities providing cost-recovery array services. The key disadvantage here is that there can be considerable heterogeneity in the array elements generated by different facilities thus complicating the comparative analysis of expression data.

Over the past few of years a consensus picture has emerged in the Drosophila genomics community that there are many advantages to be gained from pooling expertise, knowledge and resources to generate a unified set of reagents for worldwide use. There are two key sets of reagents that need to be produced; a set of transcriptome array products designed according to the most recent annotation of the genome and whole-genome tiling arrays encompassing the entire euchromatic genome for expression and genome structure studies.

The advantages of generating a widely available and uniform set of array reagents are that microarray data collected from different studies may be more easily compared. Thus by providing more consistent data from a non-commercial platform the information in microarray repositories becomes more suitable for subsequent data-mining. Second, there can be considerable cost benefits if a core set of reagents are designed and manufactured for distribution to research groups around the world. Third, quality control of a core set of reagents will be more cost effective and of a higher quality if those reagents are generated in bulk as a core resource. Finally, the concerted activity of the world-wide Drosophila community will help drive the development of improved microarrays containing validated elements.

To consolidate these objectives we have formed an international consortium to collaborate in the development of these key genomics resources for the worldwide fly community. The goal is to cooperate in the design and acquisition of microarray resources for the benefit of the entire research community and try and ensure that these resources are made as widely available as possible at a realistic cost. This site describes the objectives of the INDAC consortium and details the progress we are making towards our ambitious goals.

INDAC is an open consortium, there are no restrictions to anyone participating in our discussions or attending INDAC meetings.