As the Metascape community grows through word-of-mouth recommendations, our responsibility grows as well. In order to continue to provide a robust and scalable biologist-oriented gene-list analysis service, we have focused on implementing a brand new server architecture in 2018. Although users may not see much change in the familiar interface, Metascape is now powered by its next-generation engine. This upgrade allows us to scale up the service as our community continue to expand. Users should also experience accelerations in data analysis due to more parallel processing components.
We do not stop at improving the site content. At this release, we introduce two new gene annotation categories: the human phenotype ontology (HPO) and a human gene-disease association data source called DisGeNET. Users familiar with “Custom Analysis” can now extract phenotype and disease annotations associated with hundreds of gene candidates with one mouse click. Please see our Gene Annotation feature to learn more.
In addition, we added four new enrichment analysis data sources. Besides DisGeNET (including HPO), we integrated TRRUST for human and mouse transcriptional regulatory networks, PaGenBase for tissue/cell-specific gene signatures, and Broad’s L1000 gene signatures based on treatments from compounds, shRNAs, cDNAs and ligands. Please be advised that these new ontology sources are currently only available under “Custom Analysis”. In addition, due to the enormous size of the L1000 signature sets (53k shRNAs, 250k compounds, 40k cDNAs, and 10k ligands), we recommend using L1000 gene sets in its own, so that it does not eclipse enrichment hits from other categories.
At Metascape, we commit to keep the data fresh, the database contents behind this release is built on Nov 20th, 2018.
On this Thanksgiving holiday, we are thankful for all Metascape users! We are also thankful for social media workers who found Metascape and helped spread the words!