History

The roots of CyDAS lay in the late 1980ies when we became aware of the problem with the ISCN nomenclature in cytogenetic data mining and statistical analyses.

In an inhouse database a simplified cytogenetic nomenclature was created for simple text matching retrievals.

In 1999, the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) started an initiative to build up competence networks in medicine. Within the competence network of "Acute and Chronic Leukemias" , a project "Central Cytogenetics" was started which aimed at the collection of a large number of cytogenetic data in the Leukemia Cytogenetic Database of the network.

This sparked a renaissance of the previous idea of a simplified cytogenetic nomenclature in order to normalize chromosome resolution, get direct access to the metainformation contained in the karyotypes and to simplify complex chromosome aberrations for data mining and statistical analyses. The so called simplified computer readable cytogenetic nomenclature (SCCN) was developed which built the basis for the CyDAS.