A reference database for tumor-related genes co-expressed with interleukin-8 using genome-scale in silico analysis

Lawrence Benbow¹ , Lynn Wang² , Maureen Laverty¹ , Suxing Liu² , Ping Qiu¹ , Richard W Bond² , Eric Gustafson¹ , Joseph A Hedrick¹ , Mitchell Kostich¹ , Jonathan R Greene¹ and Luquan Wang¹

¹Discovery Technology Department, Schering-Plough Research Institute, 2015 Galloping Hill Rd, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA

²Tumor Biology Department, Schering-Plough Research Institute, 2015 Galloping Hill Rd, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Genomics 2002, 3:29doi:10.1186/1471-2164-3-29


Published:	11 October 2002

Abstract

Background

The EST database provides a rich resource for gene discovery and in silico expression analysis. We report a novel computational approach to identify co-expressed genes using EST database, and its application to IL-8.

Results

IL-8 is represented in 53 dbEST cDNA libraries. We calculated the frequency of occurrence of all the genes represented in these cDNA libraries, and ranked the candidates based on a Z-score. Additional analysis suggests that most IL-8 related genes are differentially expressed between non-tumor and tumor tissues. To focus on IL-8's function in tumor tissues, we further analyzed and ranked the genes in 16 IL-8 related tumor libraries.

Conclusions

This method generated a reference database for genes co-expressed with IL-8 and could facilitate further characterization of functional association among genes.