UCSC Visigene: A Gene Expression Database You Need
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Whether we’ve just started a project or we’re expanding our current one, there are few things more overwhelming than learning about a new gene from square one. Just understanding the logistics can be a killer (Where is it expressed? What other proteins interact with it?…) and usually necessitates reading/skimming/sleeping through a chest-high pile of reprints. Until now…
Enter UCSC Visigene. In this video, Michael McEvoy explains a tool that should make us very happy we don’t live in the days of mailing in reprint requests to journals and then waiting for them to arrive in the mail (yes, that really did used to happen!). The program aggregates known expression data and pulls the raw data for both the gene of interest as well as other genes known to interact with it, for example a ligand-receptor pair. By highlighting known interacting partners, UCSC Visigene may even enable new hypotheses – “Interesting, my gene is expressed ubiquitously, but a very strong binding partner is only expressed in the liver. Maybe that suggests my gene plays a role in…”
Getting our heads around the insane volume of scientific literature generated these days is often half the battle in moving a project forward. With tools like UCSC Visigene, at least the battle is under our command.
