Online period estimation and determination of rhythmicity in circadian data, using the BioDare data infrastructure

Circadian biology is a major area of research in many species. One of the key objectives of data analysis in this field is to quantify the rhythmic properties of the experimental data. Standalone software such as our earlier Biological Rhythm Analysis Software Suite (BRASS) is widely used. Different parts of the community have settled on different software packages, sometimes for historical reasons. Recent advances in experimental techniques and available computing power have led to an almost exponential growth in the size of the experimental data sets being generated. This, together with the trend towards multinational, multidisciplinary projects and public data dissemination, has led to a requirement to be able to store and share these large data sets. BioDare (Biological Data repository) is an online system which encompasses data storage, data sharing, and processing and analysis. This chapter outlines the description of an experiment for BioDare, how to upload and share the experiment and associated data, and how to process and analyze the data. Functions of BRASS that are not supported in BioDare are also briefly summarized. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014.