GOstat: Find statistically overrepresented Gene
Tim Beissbarth1, Terry Speed2
1beissbarth@wehi.edu.au, WEHI; 2terry@wehi.adu.au, WEHI
Modern experimental techniques, as for example DNA
microarrays, as a result produce usually a long list of
genes, which are potentially interesting in the analyzed
process. In order to gain biological understanding from this
type of data, it is necessary to analyze the functional
annotations of all genes in this list. The Gene-Ontology
database (GO) provides a useful tool to annotate and analyze
the functions of a large number of genes. Here we introduce
a tool that utilizes this information to obtain an
understanding of which annotations are typical for the
analyzed list of genes. This program automatically obtains
the GO annotations from a database and generates statistics
of which annotations are overrepresented in the analyzed
list of genes. This results in a list of GO terms sorted by
their specificity. Our program GOstat is accessible via the
Internet at http://gostat.wehi.edu.au.