RNA-Seq data analysis results in lists of genes that may have a similar function, based on differential gene expression analysis or co-expression network analysis. While tools have been developed to identify biological processes that are enriched in the genes sets, there remains a need for tools that identify enrichment of tissue-specific genes.

Iowa State University researchers have developed TissueEnrich, a tool that calculates tissue-specific gene enrichment in an input gene set. They demonstrated that TissueEnrich can assign tissue identities to single cell clusters and differentiated embryonic stem cells.

Availability – The TissueEnrich web application is freely available at http://tissueenrich.gdcb.iastate.edu/. The R package is available through Bioconductor at https://bioconductor.org/packages/TissueEnrich. Both the web application and R package are for non-profit academic use under the MIT license.