A web-based application for statistical evaluation of various functional categories for arbitraty gene sets.

Modern high-throughput methods generate large sets of genes and proteins that cannot be analyzed manually. Therefore, computer-aided gene set analysis tools that try to identify significantly enriched functional categories in these sets have gained increasing importance.

GeneTrail facilitates the statistical evaluation of high-throughput genomic or proteomic data sets with respect to enrichment of functional categories. Our web-based application covers a wide variety of biological categories and pathways, among others KEGG, TRANSPATH, TRANSFAC, and GO. Currently, GeneTrail provides two common statistical approaches, ‘Over-Representation Analysis’ (ORA) comparing a reference set of genes to a test set, and ‘Gene Set Enrichment Analysis’ (GSEA) scoring sorted lists of genes.