A Web-enabled database of human gene expression controlled annotations for gene list functional evaluation

Modern biomolecular high-throughput technologies can produce experimental results made of lists of hundreds of candidate interesting genes in the condition under study. These lists need to be biologically interpreted to achieve a better knowledge of the patho-physiological phenomena involved in the studied conditions. To reach this goal, several functional, structural, and phenotypic annotations are available within heterogeneous and widely distributed databanks. Among them, gene expression information is a useful resource to better understand gene functions. We previously developed GFINDer, a Web server that aggregates genomic annotations sparsely available in numerous databanks accessible via the Internet and allows performing statistical analysis of functional and phenotypic annotations of gene lists. To take full advantage of gene expression information provided by eVOC ontologies, we imported them in the GFINDer system. For this purpose and to keep updated such information in the GFINDer database when new releases of them are available, we designed and implemented specific parsing and updating procedures. Moreover, we developed new GFINDer modules that allow annotating human nucleotide sequences with the imported eVOC controlled information on their expression features in order to explore and statistically analyze them.