Differential Expression Gene Explorer (DrEdGE): A tool for generating interactive online data visualizations for exploration of quantitative transcript abundance datasets

Abstract

As the scientific community becomes increasingly interested in data sharing, there is a growing need for tools that facilitate the querying of public data. Mining of RNA-seq datasets, for example, has value to many biomedical researchers, yet is often effectively inaccessible to non-genomicist experts, even when the raw data are available. Here we present DrEdGE (dredge.bio.unc.edu), a free Web-based tool that facilitates data sharing between genomicists and their colleagues. The DrEdGE software guides genomicists through easily creating interactive online data visualizations, which colleagues can then explore and query according to their own conditions to discover genes, samples, or patterns of interest. We demonstrate DrEdGEs features with three example websites we generated from publicly available datasets--human neuronal tissue, mouse embryonic tissue, and a C. elegans embryonic series. DrEdGE increases the utility of large genomics datasets by removing the technical obstacles that prevent interested parties from exploring the data independently.