Interspecies Gene Name Extrapolation--A New Approach

PLoS One. 2015 Sep 25;10(9):e0138751. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138751. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The use of animal models has facilitated numerous scientific developments, especially when employing "omics" technologies to study the effects of various environmental factors on humans. Our study presents a new bioinformatics pipeline suitable when the generated microarray data from animal models does not contain the necessary human gene name annotation. We conducted single color gene expression microarray on duodenum and spleen tissue obtained from pigs which have been exposed to zearalenone and Escherichia coli contamination, either alone or combined. By performing a combination of file format modifications and data alignments using various online tools as well as a command line environment, we performed the pig to human gene name extrapolation with an average yield of 58.34%, compared to 3.64% when applying more simple methods. In conclusion, while online data analysis portals on their own are of great importance in data management and assessment, our new pipeline provided a more effective approach for a situation which can be frequently encountered by researchers in the "omics" era.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Genes*
  • Humans
  • Internet
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation / methods
  • Software
  • Terminology as Topic*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by funds from the Romanian Ministry of Research and Technology: PNII-PCCA-102/2011-2016 with title “Impact of feed co-contamination and mitigating solutions to increase feed safety, animal health and food quality” (CB IT). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.