SDRS—an algorithm for analyzing large-scale dose–response data

Summary: Dose–response information is critical to understanding drug effects, yet analytical methods for dose–response assays cannot cope with the dimensionality of large-scale screening data such as the microarray profiling data. To overcome this limitation, we developed and implemented the Sigmoidal Dose Response Search (SDRS) algorithm, a grid search-based method designed to handle large-scale dose–response data. This method not only calculates the pharmacological parameters for every assay, but also provides built-in statistic that enables downstream systematic analyses, such as characterizing dose response at the transcriptome level. Availability: Bio::SDRS is freely available from CPAN (www.cpan.org). Contacts: ruiruji@gmail.com; bruc@acm.org Supplementary Information: Supplementary data is available at Bioinformatics online.