MetaFun: Unveiling sex differences in multiple omics studies through comprehensive functional meta-analysis

Abstract

While sex-based differences in various health scenarios have been thoroughly acknowledged in the literature, we lack a deep analysis of sex as a variable in this context. To fill this knowledge gap, we created MetaFun as an easy-to-use web-based tool to meta-analyze multiple transcriptomic datasets with a sex-based perspective to gain major statistical power and biological soundness. Furthermore, MetaFun can be used to perform case-control meta-analyses, allowing researchers with basic programming skills to access this methodology. Availability and implementationMetaFun is freely available at http://bioinfo.cipf.es/metafun The back end was implemented in R and Java, and the front end was developed using Angular Contactfgarcia@cipf.es, mhidalgo@cipf.es Supplementary informationR code available at https://gitlab.com/ubb-cipf/metafunr