Hello!

This will be the blog that accompanies our  bioinformatic analysis site, whatismygene.com .

On the site, you'll find some background on the various sorts of analyses that can be performed on the site...gene searches, co-expression analysis, bio-enrichment, and a few esoteric tools as well, all backed by a monster database. The explanations are admittedly terse; we can delve deeper into the functions of the site here. We won't shy away from discussions of the weaknesses of our methods as well.

Not mentioned in the site's primer is the fact that whenever we enter new sets of studies into our database, we examine them individually for overlap (via Fisher's exact test) with previously entered studies. This sometimes points out possible errors we've made in data entry, but there's a more basic reason we take this step: curiosity. The result is a large array of observations and hypotheses, none of which have crystallized into something resembling an academic paper. Is there a link between production of dsRNA and Alzheimer's? What really is a "cytokine storm"? Do micro-RNA target lists and micro-RNA knockdown/overexpression studies align at all? Could standard chemotherapy/immunotherapy agents shrink primary cancers while promoting metastasis? Which health foods and traditional medicines actually have interesting transcriptomic effects? We plan on devoting a big chunk of this blog to these sorts of questions.

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