North West Cancer Research Institute, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2UW, UK, Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Graz University of Technology, Petersgasse 14, 8010 Graz, Austria, Core Facility Bioinformatics, Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology, Petersgasse 14, 8010 Graz, Austria, NISCHR Cancer Genetics Biomedical Research Unit, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2UW, UK, Liverpool Cancer Research UK Centre, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, Merseyside L3 9TA, UK and Applied Mathematics and Computing Group, Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL, UK.
Database (Oxford). 2014 Apr 7;2014(0):bau024. doi: 10.1093/database/bau024. Print 2014.
The identification of cancer-restricted biomarkers is fundamental to the development of novel cancer therapies and diagnostic tools. The construction of comprehensive profiles to define tissue- and cancer-specific gene expression has been central to this. To this end, the exploitation of the current wealth of 'omic'-scale databases can be facilitated by automated approaches, allowing researchers to directly address specific biological questions. Here we present CancerEST, a user-friendly and intuitive web-based tool for the automated identification of candidate cancer markers/targets, for examining tissue specificity as well as for integrated expression profiling. CancerEST operates by means of constructing and meta-analyzing expressed sequence tag (EST) profiles of user-supplied gene sets across an EST database supporting 36 tissue types. Using a validation data set from the literature, we show the functionality and utility of CancerEST. DATABASE URL: http://www.cancerest.org.uk.
鉴定癌症相关的生物标志物对于开发新型癌症治疗方法和诊断工具至关重要。构建全面的图谱来定义组织和癌症特异性基因表达一直是这方面的核心。为此，可以通过自动化方法利用当前大量的“组学”规模数据库，使研究人员能够直接解决特定的生物学问题。在这里，我们介绍了 CancerEST，这是一个用户友好且直观的基于网络的工具，用于自动识别候选癌症标志物/靶点，检查组织特异性以及进行综合表达谱分析。CancerEST 通过构建和元分析用户提供的基因集在支持 36 种组织类型的 EST 数据库中的表达序列标签 (EST) 图谱来运行。我们使用来自文献的验证数据集展示了 CancerEST 的功能和实用性。数据库 URL：http://www.cancerest.org.uk。
