GExplore: a Web Server for Integrated Queries of Protein Domains, Gene Expression and Mutant Phenotypes

Background: The majority of the genes even in well-studied multi-cellular model organisms havenot been functionally characterized yet. Mining the numerous genome wide data sets related toprotein function to retrieve potential candidate genes for a particular biological process remains achallenge.Description: GExplore has been developed to provide a user-friendly database interface for datamining at the gene expression/protein function level to help in hypothesis development andexperiment design. It supports combinatorial searches for proteins with certain domains, tissue- ordevelopmental stage-specific expression patterns, and mutant phenotypes. GExplore operates ona stand-alone database and has fast response times, which is essential for exploratory searches. Theinterface is not only user-friendly, but also modular so that it accommodates additional data sets inthe future.Conclusion: GExplore is an online database for quick mining of data related to gene and proteinfunction, providing a multi-gene display of data sets related to the domain composition of proteinsas well as expression and phenotype data. GExplore is publicly available at: http://genome.sfu.ca/gexplore/