Section: New Software and Platforms

metaMA package for meta-analysis of microarray data

Participant : Guillemette Marot.

metaMA is a specialised software for microarrays. It is an R package which combines either p-values or modified effect sizes from different studies to find differentially expressed genes. The main competitor of metaMA is geneMeta. Compared to geneMeta, metaMA offers an improvement for small sample size datasets since the corresponding modelling is based on shrinkage approaches.

This software is routinely used by biologists from INRA, Jouy en Josas (it has been included in a local analysis pipeline) but its diffusion on the CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/metaMA/index.html ) makes it available to a wider community, as attested by the citations of publications related to the methods implemented in the software.

Maintenance in 2014 concerned documentation updates and users assistance.