Title
GOAL: a software tool for assessing biological significance of genes groups.
Abstract
Modern high throughput experimental techniques such as DNA microarrays often result in large lists of genes. Computational biology tools such as clustering are then used to group together genes based on their similarity in expression profiles. Genes in each group are probably functionally related. The functional relevance among the genes in each group is usually characterized by utilizing available biological knowledge in public databases such as Gene Ontology (GO), KEGG pathways, association between a transcription factor (TF) and its target genes, and/or gene networks.We developedGene Ontology AnaLyzer, a software tool specifically designed for the functional evaluation of gene groups. GOAL implements and supports efficient and statistically rigorous functional interpretations of gene groups through its integration with available GO, TF-gene association data, and association with KEGG pathways. In order to facilitate more specific functional characterization of a gene group, we implement three GO-tree search strategies rather than one as in most existing GO analysis tools. Furthermore, GOAL offers flexibility in deployment. It can be used as a standalone tool, a plug-in to other computational biology tools, or a web server application.We developed a functional evaluation software tool, GOAL, to perform functional characterization of a gene group. GOAL offers three GO-tree search strategies and combines its strength in function integration, portability and visualization, and its flexibility in deployment. Furthermore, GOAL can be used to evaluate and compare gene groups as the output from computational biology tools such as clustering algorithms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1186/1471-2105-11-229
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
dna microarray,gene network,transcription factor,microarrays,functional integration,bioinformatics,algorithms,computational biology,high throughput
Gene,Biology,KEGG,Genomics,Bioinformatics,Cluster analysis,Genetics,Gene regulatory network,Gene expression profiling,DNA microarray,Transcription factor
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
11
1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
17
0.60
19
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alain B. Tchagang1667.34
Alexander Gawronski2170.94
Hugo Bérubé3191.33
Sieu Phan46111.73
Fazel Famili520718.62
Youlian Pan6689.85