29/9/2010

DisGeNET, a new software to query and analyze a network representation of human gene-disease databases

The Integrative Biomedical group of GRIB (IMIM/ UPF) led by Ferran Sanz has published at the journal Bioinformatics an article that shows DisGeNET, a new plugin for Cytoscape to query and analyze a network representation of human gene-disease databases.

For this purpose, they have developed a new gene-disease database integrating data from several public sources. DisGeNET allows user-friendly access to our database, which includes queries restricted to (i) the original data source, (ii) the association type, (iii) the disorder class of interest and (iv) specific diseases, respectively genes. It represents gene-disease associations in terms of bipartite graphs and additionally provides gene centric and disease centric views of the data. It assists the user in the interpretation and exploration of human complex diseases with respect to their genetic origin by a variety of built-in functions.
Moreover, DisGeNET permits multicoloring of nodes (genes/diseases) according to their disease classes for expedient visualization. DisGeNET is distributed under the GNU GPL licence.

Article reference: DisGeNET: a Cytoscape plugin to visualize, integrate, search and analyze gene-disease networks. Anna Bauer-Mehren; Michael Rautschka; Ferran Sanz; Laura I. Furlong. Bioinformatics 2010