New Search Tool for Gene Expression

October 2, 2013 | It's been 23 years since the BLAST program was first published to help researchers search large databases for specific DNA or amino acid sequences, and now a team of researchers wants to provide the same functionality for searching through data on gene expression. Ziv Bar-Joseph, with a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Bar-Ilan University, has released ExpressionBlast, a search tool for digging through the massive Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). GEO is a public database for DNA microarrays, holding information from hundreds of thousands of experiments measuring gene expression. Previously, researchers searching the GEO had to rely on keywords, whose usefulness varies from task to task and from submitter to submitter. ExpressionBlast bypasses the keywords by performing text analysis on the raw data. Bar-Joseph's team also designed a user-friendly interface for the tool, which can be accessed at http://www.expression.cs.cmu.edu/.