Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

GEO database

Lab-Less Research

Monya Baker at Nature News described how public data repositories like the NCBI's Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) have been a boon for researchers, who are using the information they store to study genetic associations to diseases without ever having to go near a microarray. S. Pelech pointed out that while this is wonderful resource for examination of the changes in gene expression within individual studies, it is difficult to compare the data across different studies. At Kinexus, we retrieved from the GEO database the human gene expression data from over 900 different studies with over 6000 biological specimens and systematically normalized the results to permit queries of mRNA levels for 23,000 genes in the open-access website TranscriptoNET (www.transcriptonet.ca). TranscriptoNET features comprehensive information on the mRNA expression levels in about 600 types of human organs, tissues, tumours and cancer cell lines. Read More...