WormExp: a web-based application for a Caenorhabditis elegans-specific gene expression enrichment analysis.

Abstract

A particular challenge of the current omics age is to make sense of the inferred differential expression of genes and proteins. The most common approach is to perform a gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis, thereby relying on a database that has been extracted from a variety of organisms and that can therefore only yield reliable information on evolutionary conserved functions. We here present a web-based application for a taxon-specific gene set exploration and enrichment analysis, which is expected to yield novel functional insights into newly determined gene sets. The approach is based on the complete collection of curated high-throughput gene expression data sets for the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, including 1786 gene sets from more than 350 studies. WormExp is available at http://wormexp.zoologie.uni-kiel.de hschulenburg@zoologie.uni-kiel.de Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.