Databases at the HTBC

We support two main databases; A cheminformatics database from MDL (ORACLE 9i) and an image storage and analysis database from Molecular Devices (ORACLE 10g).

1. The High-throughput Database stores all the information from the compound libraries and links this information together with the results from screening. The cheminformatics system we installed is from MDL Information systems and contains the following products:

(A) MDL ISIS Enterprise Edition, including, ISIS/Draw, ISIS/Base, ISIS for Excel, ISIS/Host with Oracle Gateway, Chime Pro/Chemscape Server, developer tools, ISIS ADK Pro, ISIS/Host API, ISIS Open Gateway & Toolkit, Relational Chemistry Server, and MDL Draw Enterprise Edition.

(B) MDL® Cheshire Enterprise Edition, a software suite of chemical structure analysis,
calculation, and manipulation functions accessible from MDL's ISIS software system.

(C) MDL® Assay Explorer Enterprise Edition, , a customizable biological data management system to capture, analyze, and store experimental results.

(D) MDL® ChemBio AE; ChemBio AE provides an integrated retrieval and
viewing solution for chemical and biological data, and chemical registration services.

(E) MDL® Plate Manager Enterprise Edition, a central repository for plate and sample information that integrates with MDL data management and chemical registration tools.

(F) MDL® Report Manager, a reporting tool that uses ISIS chemical structure searching to integrate and extract data from multiple databases into pre-formatted reports.

2. The Molecular Devices MetaXpress image acquisition software captures and stores image files from the ImageXpress Micro during high-content screens. The images are stored in the MDCStore database which can use either Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. MetaXpress is also used for image analysis, through the use of custom scripts or analysis application modules. The analysis data can then be mined using AcuityXpress cellular informatics software. These combined applications not only store the image files but also the image analysis results. Currently, we have over 3 Terabytes of RAID5 SCSI storage space.

Each database is stored on separate Dell Poweredge 2650 servers with external RAID arrays (Dell Powervault 220S). Data is backed up using a Dell Powervault 132T (LTO-2 autoloader) tape back up with Symantec Backup Exec 11d.