RNA-seq is widely used for transcriptomic profiling, but the bioinformatics analysis of resultant data can be time-consuming and challenging, especially for biologists. Researchers at South Dakota State University...
Read More »EGSEA – easy and efficient ensemble gene set testing
Gene set enrichment analysis is a popular approach for prioritising the biological processes perturbed in genomic datasets. The Bioconductor project hosts over 80 software packages capable of gene set...
Read More »A comparison of Illumina and Ion Torrent sequencing platforms, and the winner is…
Though Illumina has largely dominated the RNA-Seq field, the simultaneous availability of Ion Torrent has left scientists wondering which platform is most effective for differential gene expression (DGE) analysis. Previous investigations of this question have typically used reference samples derived ...
Read More »goSTAG – gene ontology subtrees to tag and annotate genes within a set
Over-representation analysis (ORA) detects enrichment of genes within biological categories. Gene Ontology (GO) domains are commonly used for gene/gene-product annotation. When ORA is employed, often times there are hundreds of statistically significant GO terms per gene set. Comparing enriched categories ...
Read More »Scalable latent-factor models applied to single-cell RNA-seq data separate biological drivers from confounding effects
Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) allows heterogeneity in gene expression levels to be studied in large populations of cells. Such heterogeneity can arise from both technical and biological factors, thus making decomposing sources of variation extremely difficult. Researchers from the European Bioinformatics ...
Read More »Analyzing and interpreting genome data at the network level with ConsensusPathDB
ConsensusPathDB consists of a comprehensive collection of human (as well as mouse and yeast) molecular interaction data integrated from 32 different public repositories and a web interface featuring a set of computational methods and visualization tools to explore these data. ...
Read More »Inferring metabolic pathway activity levels from RNA-Seq data
Assessing pathway activity levels is a plausible way to quantify metabolic differences between various conditions. This is usually inferred from microarray expression data. Wide availability of NGS technology has triggered a demand for bioinformatics tools capable of analyzing pathway activity ...
Read More »gsa4mirna – Integrated gene set analysis for microRNA studies
Functional interpretation of miRNA expression data is currently done in a three step procedure: select differentially expressed miRNAs, find their target genes, and carry out gene set overrepresentation analysis Nevertheless, major limitations of this approach have already been described at ...
Read More »Zika virus infected human neural stem cells have unique transcriptomic signatures
The single-stranded RNA Flavivirus, Zika virus (ZIKV), has recently re-emerged and spread rapidly across the western hemisphere’s equatorial countries, primarily through Aedes mosquito transmission. While symptoms in adult infections appear to be self-limiting and mild, severe birth defects, such as ...
Read More »miTALOS v2 – Analyzing Tissue Specific microRNA Function
MicroRNAs are involved in almost all biological processes and have emerged as regulators of signaling pathways. Researchers from the German Research Center for Environmental Health show that miRNA target genes and pathway genes are not uniformly expressed across human tissues. To ...
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