Biological Rhythms Analysis Software
System, or BRASS, was a Microsoft Excel workbook for the analysis and display of
rhythmic data series. Now replaced by BioDare/BioDare2.
Description
Many in the circadian biology community already use the FFT NLLS suite of programs,
written by Dr. Martin Straume (formerly of the
Centre for
Biomathematical Technology, University of Virginia; now of
COBRA LLC) in order to estimate period and phase values
from
rhythmic experimental data. We have developed a user interface to act as a
front end to these programs. BRASS will import data from most of the data
acquisition packages commonly used in plant circadian research, such as Kujata,
Metamorph, Night Owl and Topcount, and also from a generic block of data. Our program will then automatically run FFT-NLLS on this data, and import the results back into MS Excel. BRASS also contains
functions to perform statistical analysis of results, and to enable the rapid
production of charts and graphs.
Brass 3.0 included a new rhythm analysis method developed
by Paul Brown and David Rand, particularly to analyse phase and waveform
properties of entrained rhythms. mFourfit is independent of FFT-NLLS. mFourfit was written in Matlab and compiled from
Matlab version 7.1 (release 14), using Matlab compiler version 4.3. Matlab
version 7.1 or later is required to run the mFourfit analysis method, or
alternatively the correct version of the Matlab Component library is required. To load the library,
you need the 102 Megabyte (!) file, MCRInstaller.exe (our version is dated 11/08/2005).
BRASS will run under MS Windows 98, 2000 Pro, but all new development is for the
Windows XP
version. Actually, it kept running at least up to Windows 7 and later Office
versions, by choosing correct XL add-ins but we stopped trying and so should
you.
