The open source ISA framework and tools, which help to manage an increasingly diverse set of life science, environmental and biomedical experiments (see ISA commons), are being used by NASA for its GeneLab platform, which expands scientists' access to research carried out in space environments.
The ultimate goal of GeneLab is to enable space exploration by allowing researchers to understand the complex responses of biological systems to the space environment.
The vast amounts of raw omics data generated by experiments aboard the International Space Station will be made available to scientists and computational researchers worldwide in an open access database.
The GeneLab data repository hosts space biology and space-related datasets funded by multiple space agencies around the world. Study data hosted in the repository include a metadata definition file formatted according to the Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) tab-delimited (tab) (ISA-Tab) specification, which can be produced using the ISA-tools ISACreator application with a customized GeneLab configuration.
The ISA model is a general-purpose model to collect and communicate complex metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technologies used, type of measurements made) mainly from 'omics-based' experiments employing a combination of technologies.
More information: Oxford e-Research Centre (ELIXIR UK)
