iGEX: an interactive Gene EXpression exploration platform for the analysis of transcriptomic and proteomic datasets

Abstract

High-throughput transcriptomic and proteomic studies have generated a rapidly expanding collection of publicly available datasets. However, extracting biological insight from these resources often requires researchers to repeatedly download, reformat, integrate and analyse individual files using specialised tools. This process is time-consuming and often requires coding expertise. Here, we present iGEX, an interactive exploration platform that can incorporate publicly available and user-generated transcriptomic and proteomic datasets into a single visual workspace to simplify the analysis of multiple transcripts and/or proteins across numerous datasets. iGEX enables researchers to select gene/protein targets and experiments and compare expression patterns across biological conditions and experiments. User-generated data can be examined alongside numerous public resources such as EMBL-EBI Expression Atlas, Bgee, and PaxDb to determine whether any observed patterns are evident across experiments, species or experimental contexts. Users can visualise and move directly between data tables, principal component analysis, expression and correlation heatmaps, hierarchical clustering and volcano plots, all of which are editable and downloadable.