WEB TOOL : An open source IDAT parsing tool for Illumina illuminaio microarrays [v1; ref status: indexed, http://f1000r.es/2f5]

The IDAT file format is used to store BeadArray data from the myriad of genomewide profiling platforms on offer from Illumina Inc. This proprietary format is output directly from the scanner and stores summary intensities for each probe-type on an array in a compact manner. A lack of open source tools to process IDAT files has hampered their uptake by the research community beyond the standard step of using the vendor’s software to extract the data they contain in a human readable text format. To fill this void, we have developed the illuminaio package that parses IDAT files from any BeadArray platform, including the decryption of files from Illumina’s gene expression arrays. illuminaio provides the first open-source package for this task