Signature Overrepresentation Analysis
Description
Pathway Analysis is the process of statistically linking observations on
the molecular level to biological processes or pathways on the systems(i.e.
organism, organ, tissue, cell) level.
Traditionally, pathway analysis methods regard pathways as collections of
single genes and treat all genes in a pathway as equally informative. This
can lead to identification of spurious pathways as statistically significant,
since components are often shared amongst pathways.
SIGORA seeks to avoid this pitfall by focusing on genes or gene-pairs
that are (as a combination) specific to a single pathway. In relying on
such pathway gene-pair signatures (Pathway-GPS), SIGORA inherently uses
the status of other genes in the experimental context to identify the most
relevant pathways.
The current version allows for pathway analysis of human and mouse datasets
and contains pre-computed Pathway-GPS data for pathways in the KEGG and
Reactome pathway repositories as well as mechanisms for extracting GPS for
user supplied repositories.