Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6T 1Z3, Canada.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2013 Jul;41(Web Server issue):W63-70. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkt338. Epub 2013 Jun 12.
The widespread applications of various 'omics' technologies in biomedical research together with the emergence of public data repositories have resulted in a plethora of data sets for almost any given physiological state or disease condition. Properly combining or integrating these data sets with similar basic hypotheses can help reduce study bias, increase statistical power and improve overall biological understanding. However, the difficulties in data management and the complexities of analytical approaches have significantly limited data integration to enable meta-analysis. Here, we introduce integrative meta-analysis of expression data (INMEX), a user-friendly web-based tool designed to support meta-analysis of multiple gene-expression data sets, as well as to enable integration of data sets from gene expression and metabolomics experiments. INMEX contains three functional modules. The data preparation module supports flexible data processing, annotation and visualization of individual data sets. The statistical analysis module allows researchers to combine multiple data sets based on P-values, effect sizes, rank orders and other features. The significant genes can be examined in functional analysis module for enriched Gene Ontology terms or Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways, or expression profile visualization. INMEX has built-in support for common gene/metabolite identifiers (IDs), as well as 45 popular microarray platforms for human, mouse and rat. Complex operations are performed through a user-friendly web interface in a step-by-step manner. INMEX is freely available at http://www.inmex.ca.
各种“组学”技术在生物医学研究中的广泛应用，以及公共数据存储库的出现，使得几乎任何给定的生理状态或疾病条件都有大量的数据集。将这些数据集与具有相似基本假设的数据集进行适当的组合或整合，可以帮助减少研究偏倚、提高统计能力并改善整体生物学理解。然而，数据管理的困难和分析方法的复杂性，极大地限制了数据的整合，以实现元分析。在这里，我们介绍了表达数据的综合荟萃分析（INMEX），这是一个用户友好的基于网络的工具，旨在支持多个基因表达数据集的荟萃分析，以及能够整合来自基因表达和代谢组学实验的数据。INMEX 包含三个功能模块。数据准备模块支持对单个数据集进行灵活的数据处理、注释和可视化。统计分析模块允许研究人员根据 P 值、效应大小、秩次和其他特征对多个数据集进行组合。在功能分析模块中，可以对显著基因进行富集的基因本体术语或京都基因与基因组百科全书（KEGG）途径，或表达谱可视化分析。INMEX 为常见的基因/代谢物标识符（IDs）以及人类、小鼠和大鼠的 45 个流行的微阵列平台提供了内置支持。复杂的操作通过用户友好的网络界面以逐步的方式执行。INMEX 可免费在 http://www.inmex.ca 获取。
