matchprobes: a Bioconductor package for the sequence-matching of microarray probe elements.

Abstract

The nucleotide sequences of the probes on a microarray can be used for a variety of purposes in the analysis of microarray experiments. We describe software and a paradigm for the creation of data packages for curating, distributing and working with probe sequence data in a uniform, across-types-of-microarrays manner. While the implementation is specific to the Bioconductor project, the ideas and general strategies are more general and could be easily adopted by other projects. The R package matchprobes is available under LGPL at http://www.bioconductor.org The package contains documentation in the form of a vignette and manual pages.