Using ChemBank to probe chemical biology.

ChemBank (http://chembank.broad.harvard.edu/) is a public, Web-based informatics environment. ChemBank stores and makes freely available data derived from small molecules and small-molecule screens and has resources for relating and studying these data. Currently, ChemBank stores information on hundreds of thousands of small molecules and hundreds of biomedically relevant assays performed at the Broad Institute screening center. Web-based analysis tools are available within ChemBank to study the relationships between small molecules, cell measurements, and cell states. This unit demonstrates the use of ChemBank data to ask and answer questions relating to chemical biology and screening experiments contained within ChemBank.

Using GenePattern for gene expression analysis.

The abundance of genomic data now available in biomedical research has stimulated the development of sophisticated statistical methods for interpreting the data, and of special visualization tools for displaying the results in a concise and meaningful manner. However, biologists often find these methods and tools difficult to understand and use correctly. GenePattern is a freely available software package that addresses this issue by providing more than 100 analysis and visualization tools for genomic research in a comprehensive user-friendly environment for users at all levels of computational experience and sophistication. This unit demonstrates how to prepare and analyze microarray data in GenePattern.

GSEA-P: a desktop application for Gene Set Enrichment Analysis.

UNLABELLED: Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) is a computational method that assesses whether an a priori defined set of genes shows statistically significant, concordant differences between two biological states. We report the availability of a new version of the Java based software (GSEA-P 2.0) that represents a major improvement on the previous release through the addition of a leading edge analysis component, seamless integration with the Molecular Signature Database (MSigDB) and an embedded browser that allows users to search for gene sets and map them to a variety of microarray platform formats. This functionality makes it possible for users to directly import gene sets from MSigDB for analysis with GSEA. We have also improved the visualizations in GSEA-P 2.0 and added links to a new form of concise gene set annotations called Gene Set Cards. These additions, as well as other improvements suggested by over 3500 users who have downloaded the software over the past year have been incorporated into this new release of the GSEA-P Java desktop program. AVAILABILITY: GSEA-P 2.0 is freely available for academic and commercial users and can be downloaded from http://www.broad.mit.edu/GSEA