Database

The PhenoGen Informatics website: tools for analyses of complex traits

Sanjiv V Bhave¹ , Cheryl Hornbaker¹ , Tzu L Phang¹ , Laura Saba¹ , Razvan Lapadat¹ , Katherina Kechris^1,2 , Jeanette Gaydos¹ , Daniel McGoldrick¹ , Andrew Dolbey¹ , Sonia Leach¹ , Brian Soriano¹ , Allison Ellington¹ , Eric Ellington¹ , Kendra Jones¹ , Jonathan Mangion³ , John K Belknap⁴ , Robert W Williams⁵ , Lawrence E Hunter¹ , Paula L Hoffman¹ and Boris Tabakoff¹

¹Department of Pharmacology, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, Aurora, CO 80045, USA

²Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, Aurora, CO 80045, USA

³MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London W12 0NN, UK

⁴US Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Portland, Oregon 97239, USA

⁵Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, 855 Monroe Avenue, Memphis, TN 38163, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Genetics 2007, 8:59doi:10.1186/1471-2156-8-59

Published:	30 August 2007

Abstract

Background

With the advent of "omics" (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and phenomics), studies can produce enormous amounts of data. Managing this diverse data and integrating with other biological data are major challenges for the bioinformatics community. Comprehensive new tools are needed to store, integrate and analyze the data efficiently.

Description

The PhenoGen Informatics website http://phenogen.uchsc.edu webcite is a comprehensive toolbox for storing, analyzing and integrating microarray data and related genotype and phenotype data. The site is particularly suited for combining QTL and microarray data to search for "candidate" genes contributing to complex traits. In addition, the site allows, if desired by the investigators, sharing of the data. Investigators can conduct "in-silico" microarray experiments using their own and/or "shared" data.

Conclusion

The PhenoGen website provides access to tools that can be used for high-throughput data storage, analyses and interpretation of the results. Some of the advantages of the architecture of the website are that, in the future, the present set of tools can be adapted for the analyses of any type of high-throughput "omics" data, and that access to new tools, available in the public domain or developed at PhenoGen, can be easily provided.