Category Archives: Comment

The Brief History of Metascape Since 2014

Five years ago (2014), we were looking for a gene-list analysis resource to recommend to biologists in our own research organizations. DAVID stood out in terms of functionality and usability, however, we noticed DAVID did not appear to be maintained. … Continue reading

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How to Adjust Metascape Network Plots?

[This is an old blog written on Saturday, September 15, 2018] Metascape relies on Cytoscape [1] to render networks, including both enrichment networks and protein-protein interaction networks.  When a network contains too many edges, it can become a visual “hair … Continue reading

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How We Keep Data Fresh?

[This is an old blog written on Thursday, December 14, 2017] We live in a big data era, where biological data and thus knowledge extracted grow rapidly.  Tools such as Metascape sit on top of various bioinformatics knowledge bases; the … Continue reading

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Protein-protein Network Analysis

[This is an old blog written on Monday, January 30, 2017] The protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis was introduced into Metascape (http://www.metascape.org) on Nov 2, 2016. We initially relied on BioGRID [1] as the proxy of all public-domain physical protein-protein … Continue reading

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Watch out gene symbols within Excel

[This is an old blog written on Wednesday, February 10, 2016] We do not recommend use gene symbols (or synonyms) as primary identifier within a gene list, especially within Excel. Excel irreversibly converts certain symbols into dates and it becomes … Continue reading

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Why DAVID should no longer be used?

[This is an old blog written on Tuesday, February 9, 2016] National Cancer Institute’s DAVID provides a set of popular bioinformatics tools that help biologists make sense of a list of gene.  However, evidences show that DAVID has not bee updated since … Continue reading

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