PulmonDB: a curated lung disease gene expression database

Abstract

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) have contrasting clinical and pathological characteristics, and interesting whole-genome transcriptomic profiles. However, data from public repositories are difficult to reprocess and reanalyze. Here we present PulmonDB, a web-based database (http://pulmondb.liigh.unam.mx/) and R library that facilitates exploration of gene expression profiles for these diseases by integrating transcriptomic data and curated annotation from different sources. We demonstrated the value of this resource by presenting the expression of already well-known genes of COPD and IPF across multiple experiments and the results of two differential expression analyses in which we successfully identified differences and similarities. With this first version of PulmonDB, we create a new hypothesis and compare the two diseases from a transcriptomics perspective.