Pathway Retrieval for Transcriptome Analysis using Fuzzy Filtering Technique andWeb Service

In biology the advent of the high-throughput technology for sequencing, probing, or screening has produced huge volume of data which could not be manually handled. Biologists have resorted to software tools in order to effectively handle them. This paper introduces a bioinformatics tool to help biologists find potentially interesting pathway maps from a transcriptome data set in which the expression levels of genes are described for both case and control samples. The tool accepts a transcriptome data set, and then selects and categorizes some of genes into four classes using a fuzzy filtering technique where classes are defined by membership functions. It collects and edits the pathway maps related to those selected genes without analyst' intervention. It invokes a sequence of web service functions from KEGG, which an online pathway database system, in order to retrieve related information, locate pathway maps, and manipulate them. It maintains all retrieved pathway maps in a local database and presents them to the analysts with graphical user interface. The tool has been successfully used in identifying target genes for further analysis in transcriptome study of human cytomegalovirous. The tool is very helpful in that it can considerably save analysts' time and efforts by collecting and presenting the pathway maps that contain some interesting genes, once a transcriptome data set is just given.