INTRODUCTION
The Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) (1) (http://smd.stanford.edu) was initially developed in 1999 to serve a small team of researchers using spotted DNA microarrays for human and yeast research at Stanford University. Since then, it has become a research tool for a much larger scientific community using multiple microarray platforms to study a myriad of biomedical research problems. SMD now supports the research of more than 1000 users in over 260 laboratories at Stanford and around the world. These users have entered data generated from more than 50 000 microarrays used to study the biology of 34 organisms, published more than 190 papers referring to data in SMD and have made the complete raw data from more than 7000 microarrays freely available via the SMD website. The public data can be selected, viewed, downloaded and analyzed by the public using most of the tools that are available to registered SMD users. The source code for SMD has been downloaded and installed at several academic and private locations.
Here, we discuss some of the recent developments at SMD that have enabled us to accept microarray data from additional platforms and image analysis software, export data in MAGE-ML format and permit greater data sharing between researchers. In addition, we present information about the latest release of the SMD source code.