Over recent years the use of microarrays has generated vast amounts of gene expression data.  However, these data are not readily accessible, particularly if you want to compare data from different studies. In a paper just published in Genome Biology, Jaak Vilo and colleagues at the University of Tartu, Estonia, have come up with a potential solution for this. They have assembled all microarray datasets in the ArrayExpress database and compiled them into a single, searchable database, allowing researchers to search for the expression of a given gene across all experiments and conditions, including in mouse as well as human. The package (called Multi Experiment Matrix, or MEM) then returns all genes significantly co-expressed with the query gene. The software package is intuitive and easy to use and potentially opens up a vast mine of largely unexplored data for researchers to exploit.  

Read the article here.

MEM is freely available and can be accessed here.

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Andrew Cosgrove

Andrew obtained his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Dundee in 2005. He joined Genome Biology in 2009 after a post doctoral research position at the University of Sheffield investigating chromosome positioning during meiosis in yeast.

Latest posts by Andrew Cosgrove (see all)

• Exploring the history of smallpox vaccination with 19th Century American vaccination kits - 16th November 2020
• The fascination of plant genomes - 20th May 2019
• Genome Biology at Genome Informatics - 18th February 2019