TriPOINT: a software tool to prioritize important genes in pathways and their non-coding regulators.

Abstract

Current approaches for pathway analyses focus on representing gene expression levels on graph representations of pathways and conducting pathway enrichment among differentially expressed genes. However, gene expression levels by themselves do not reflect the overall picture as non-coding factors play an important role to regulate gene expression. To incorporate these non-coding factors into pathway analyses and to systematically prioritize genes in a pathway we introduce a new software: Triangulation of Perturbation Origins and Identification of Non-Coding Targets. Triangulation of Perturbation Origins and Identification of Non-Coding Targets is a pathway analysis tool, implemented in Java that identifies the significance of a gene under a condition (e.g. a disease phenotype) by studying graph representations of pathways, analyzing upstream and downstream gene interactions and integrating non-coding regions that may be regulating gene expression levels. The TriPOINT open source software is freely available at https://github.uconn.edu/ajt06004/TriPOINT under the GPL v3.0 license. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.