Co-expressed genes are often expected to be functionally related and many bioinformatics approaches based on co-expression have been developed to infer their biological role. However, such annotations may be unreliable, whereas the evolutionary conservation of gene co-expression among species may form a basis for more confident predictions. The huge amount of expression data (microarrays, SAGE, ESTs) has already allowed functional studies based on conserved co-expression in animals. Up to now, the implementation of analogous tools for plants has been strongly limited probably by the paucity and heterogeneity of data. Here we present ORTom, a tomato-centred EST data-mining approach based on conserved co-expression in the Solanaceae family. ORTom can be used to predict functional relationships among genes and to prioritize candidate genes for targeted studies. The method consists in ranking ESTs co-expressed with a gene of interest according to the level of expression pattern conservation in phylogenetically-related plants (potato, tobacco and pepper) to obtain lists of putative functionally-related genes. The lists are then analyzed for Gene Ontology keyword enrichment. The web server ORTom has been implemented to make the results publicly-available and searchable. Few biological examples on how the tool can be used are presented

ORTom: a multi-species approach based onconserved co-expression to identify putative functional relationships among genes in tomato

PROVERO, Paolo;
2010-01-01

Abstract

Co-expressed genes are often expected to be functionally related and many bioinformatics approaches based on co-expression have been developed to infer their biological role. However, such annotations may be unreliable, whereas the evolutionary conservation of gene co-expression among species may form a basis for more confident predictions. The huge amount of expression data (microarrays, SAGE, ESTs) has already allowed functional studies based on conserved co-expression in animals. Up to now, the implementation of analogous tools for plants has been strongly limited probably by the paucity and heterogeneity of data. Here we present ORTom, a tomato-centred EST data-mining approach based on conserved co-expression in the Solanaceae family. ORTom can be used to predict functional relationships among genes and to prioritize candidate genes for targeted studies. The method consists in ranking ESTs co-expressed with a gene of interest according to the level of expression pattern conservation in phylogenetically-related plants (potato, tobacco and pepper) to obtain lists of putative functionally-related genes. The lists are then analyzed for Gene Ontology keyword enrichment. The web server ORTom has been implemented to make the results publicly-available and searchable. Few biological examples on how the tool can be used are presented
2010
73(4-5)
519
532
http://www.springerlink.com/content/57214132457800j6/fulltext.pdf
Solanaceae; Conserved co-expression; Functional genomics; Expressed sequence tag (EST); Systems biology
Miozzi L; Provero P; Accotto GP
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/82092
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