CLOE: Identification of putative functional relationships among genes by comparison of expression profiles between two species

摘要

Background Public repositories of microarray data contain an incredible amount of information that is potentially relevant to explore functional relationships among genes by meta-analysis of expression profiles. However, the widespread use of this resource by the scientific community is at the moment limited by the limited availability of effective tools of analysis. We here describe CLOE, a simple cDNA microarray data mining strategy based on meta-analysis of datasets from pairs of species. The method consists in ranking EST probes in the datasets of the two species according to the similarity of their expression profiles with that of two EST probes from orthologous genes, and extracting orthologous EST pairs from a given top interval of the ranked lists. The Gene Ontology annotation of the obtained candidate partners is then analyzed for