By Roberta Minotti and Philip Zimmermann
© NEBION AG. July 31, 2015

Abstract

GENEVESTIGATOR^® is a powerful tool for combined exploration of many transcriptomic datasets (microarray and RNA-seq). At the time of this analysis, its database contained over 120,000 extensively curated, quality controlled and globally normalized microarrays from human, mouse and rat. Thanks to several academic and industrial collaborations, it has a very rich content for respiratory diseaeses, in particular COPD, smoking, IPF and PAH. In this example, we searched for genes specifically up-regulated in lung tissues of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Using GENEVESTIGATOR^®, we identified candidate genes related to COPD (in smoker populations), of which some were already known to be associated with the onset of the disease but several others have never been published in this context. The results from the human platform were subsequently confirmed in the mouse datasets. We show a particular workflow and demonstrate how GENEVESTIGATOR^® enables, in a few clicks, to identify genes highly specific for a certain disease and to confirm the results in other organisms.