Over recent years the use of microarrays has generated vast amounts of gene expression data. However, these data are not readily accessible, particularly if you want to compare data from different studies. In a paper just published inGenome Biology,Jaak Viloand colleagues at the University of Tartu, Estonia, have come up with a potential solution for this. They have assembled all microarray datasets in theArrayExpressdatabase and compiled them into a single, searchable database, allowing researchers to search for the expression of a given gene across all experiments and conditions, including in mouse as well as human. The package (called Multi Experiment Matrix, or MEM) then returns all genes significantly co-expressed with the query gene. The software package is intuitive and easy to use and potentially opens up a vast mine of largely unexplored data for researchers to exploit.

Read the articlehere.

MEM is freely available and can be accessedhere.