• KOGO NEWS
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.29-33
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• 2006

Gene set analysis is a new concept and method. to analyze and interpret microarray gene expression data and tries to extract biological meaning from gene expression data at gene set level rather than at gene level. Compared with methods which select a few tens or hundreds of genes before gene ontology and pathway analysis, gene set analysis identifies important gene ontology terms and pathways more consistently and performs well even in gene expression data sets with minimal or moderate gene expression changes. Moreover, gene set analysis is useful for comparing multiple gene expression data sets dealing with similar biological questions. This review briefly summarizes the rationale behind the gene set analysis and introduces several algorithms and tools now available for gene set analysis.

• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.98-116
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• 2022

The small GTPase RhoA has been studied extensively for its role in actin dynamics. In this study, multiple bioinformatics tools were applied cooperatively to the microarray dataset GSE64714 to explore previously unidentified functions of RhoA. Comparative gene expression analysis revealed 545 differentially expressed genes in RhoA-null cells versus controls. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was conducted with three gene set collections: (1) the hallmark, (2) the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway, and (3) the Gene Ontology Biological Process. GSEA results showed that RhoA is related strongly to diverse pathways: cell cycle/growth, DNA repair, metabolism, keratinization, response to fungus, and vesicular transport. These functions were verified by heatmap analysis, KEGG pathway diagramming, and direct acyclic graphing. The use of multiple gene set collections restricted the leakage of information extracted. However, gene sets from individual collections are heterogenous in gene element composition, number, and the contextual meaning embraced in names. Indeed, there was a limit to deriving functions with high accuracy and reliability simply from gene set names. The comparison of multiple gene set collections showed that although the gene sets had similar names, the gene elements were extremely heterogeneous. Thus, the type of collection chosen and the analytical context influence the interpretation of GSEA results. Nonetheless, the analyses of multiple collections made it possible to derive robust and consistent function identifications. This study confirmed several well-described roles of RhoA and revealed less explored functions, suggesting future research directions.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.133-136
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• 2007

The Gene Set network viewer (GSnet) visualizes the functional enrichment of a given gene set with a protein interaction network and is implemented as a plug-in for the Cytoscape platform. The functional enrichment of a given gene set is calculated using a hypergeometric test based on the Gene Ontology annotation. The protein interaction network is estimated using public data. Set operations allow a complex protein interaction network to be decomposed into a functionally-enriched module of interest. GSnet provides a new framework for gene set analysis by integrating a priori knowledge of a biological network with functional enrichment analysis.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.19-26
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• 2008

Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) is a computational method to identify statistically significant gene sets showing significant differences between two groups of microarray expression profiles and simultaneously uncover their biological meanings in an elegant way by employing gene annotation databases, such as Cytogenetic Band, KEGG pathways, gene ontology, and etc. For the gone set enrichment analysis, all the genes in a given dataset are first ordered by the signal-to-noise ratio between the groups and then further analyses are proceeded. Despite of its impressive results in several previous studies, however, gene ranking by the signal-to-noise ratio makes it difficult to consider highly up-regulated genes and highly down-regulated genes at the same time as the candidates of significant genes, which possibly reflect certain situations incurred in metabolic and signaling pathways. To deal with this problem, in this article, we investigate the gene set enrichment analysis method with Fisher criterion for gene ranking and also evaluate its effects in Leukemia related pathway analyses.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.135-141
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• 2013

Gene set analysis is a powerful tool for interpreting a genome-wide association study result and is gaining popularity these days. Comparison of the gene sets obtained for a variety of traits measured from a single genetic epidemiology dataset may give insights into the biological mechanisms underlying these traits. Based on the previously published single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotype data on 8,842 individuals enrolled in the Korea Association Resource project, we performed a series of systematic genome-wide association analyses for 49 quantitative traits of basic epidemiological, anthropometric, or blood chemistry parameters. Each analysis result was subjected to subsequent gene set analyses based on Gene Ontology (GO) terms using gene set analysis software, GSA-SNP, identifying a set of GO terms significantly associated to each trait ($p_{corr}$ < 0.05). Pairwise comparison of the traits in terms of the semantic similarity in their GO sets revealed surprising cases where phenotypically uncorrelated traits showed high similarity in terms of biological pathways. For example, the pH level was related to 7 other traits that showed low phenotypic correlations with it. A literature survey implies that these traits may be regulated partly by common pathways that involve neuronal or nerve systems.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.42 no.8
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• pp.579-588
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• 2019

Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) is a popular tool to identify underlying biological processes in clinical samples using their gene expression phenotypes. GSEA measures the enrichment of annotated gene sets that represent biological processes for differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in clinical samples. GSEA may be suboptimal for functional gene sets; however, because DEGs from the expression dataset may not be functional genes per se but dysregulated genes perturbed by bona fide functional genes. To overcome this shortcoming, we developed network-based GSEA (NGSEA), which measures the enrichment score of functional gene sets using the expression difference of not only individual genes but also their neighbors in the functional network. We found that NGSEA outperformed GSEA in identifying pathway gene sets for matched gene expression phenotypes. We also observed that NGSEA substantially improved the ability to retrieve known anti-cancer drugs from patient-derived gene expression data using drug-target gene sets compared with another method, Connectivity Map. We also repurposed FDA-approved drugs using NGSEA and experimentally validated budesonide as a chemical with anti-cancer effects for colorectal cancer. We, therefore, expect that NGSEA will facilitate both pathway interpretation of gene expression phenotypes and anti-cancer drug repositioning. NGSEA is freely available at www.inetbio.org/ngsea.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2010

Recently lots of attention has been paid to gene set analysis for identifying differentially expressed gene-sets between two sample groups. Unlike earlier approaches, the gene set analysis enables us to find significant gene-sets along with their functional characteristics. For this reason, various novel approaches have been suggested lately for gene set analysis. As one of such, PAGE is a parametric approach that employs average difference (AD) as an expression metric to quantify expression differences between two sample groups and assumes that the distribution of gene scores is normal. This approach is preferred to non-parametric approach because of more effective performance. However, the metric AD does not reflect either gene expression intensities or variances over samples in calculating gene scores. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the usefulness of several other expression metrics for parametric gene-set analysis, which consider actual expression intensities of genes or their expression variances over samples. For this purpose, we examined three expression metrics, WAD (weighted average difference), FC (Fisher's criterion), and Abs_SNR (Absolute value of signal-to-noise ratio) for parametric gene set analysis and evaluated their experimental results.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.397-408
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• 2009

The development of microarray technology makes possible to analyse many thousands of genes simultaneously. While it is important to test each gene whether it shows changes in expression associated with a phenotype, human diseases are thought to occur through the interactions of multiple genes within a same functional cafe-gory. Recent research interests aims to directly test the behavior of sets of functionally related genes, instead of focusing on single genes. Gene set enrichment analysis(GSEA), significance analysis of microarray to gene-set analysis(SAM-GS) and parametric analysis of gene set enrichment(PAGE) have been applied widely as a tool for gene-set analyses. We describe their problems and propose an alternative method using a parametric analysis by adopting normal score transformation of gene expression values. Performance of the newly derived method is compared with previous methods on three real microarray datasets.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.56-64
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• 2017

We have previously reported that NS-398, a cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2)-selective inhibitor, inhibited replicative cellular senescence in human dermal fibroblasts and skin aging in hairless mice. In contrast, celecoxib, another COX-2-selective inhibitor, and aspirin, a non-selective COX inhibitor, accelerated the senescence and aging. To figure out causal factors for the senescence-modulating effect of the inhibitors, we here performed cDNA microarray experiment and subsequent Gene Set Enrichment Analysis. The data showed that several senescence-related gene sets were regulated by the inhibitor treatment. NS-398 up-regulated gene sets involved in the tumor necrosis factor ${\beta}$ receptor pathway and the fructose and mannose metabolism, whereas it down-regulated a gene set involved in protein secretion. Celecoxib up-regulated gene sets involved in G2M checkpoint and E2F targets. Aspirin up-regulated the gene set involved in protein secretion, and down-regulated gene sets involved in RNA transcription. These results suggest that COX inhibitors modulate cellular senescence by different mechanisms and will provide useful information to understand senescence-modulating mechanisms of COX inhibitors.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.200-209
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• 2007

We generated gene expression data from the tissues of 50 gastric cancer patients, and applied meta-analysis and gene set analysis to this data and three other stomach cancer gene expression data sets to define the gene expression changes in gastric tumors. By meta-analysis we identified genes consistently changed in gastric carcinomas, while gene set analysis revealed consistently changed biological themes. Genes and gene sets involved in digestion, fatty acid metabolism, and ion transport were consistently down-regulated in gastric carcinomas, while those involved in cellular proliferation, cell cycle, and DNA replication were consistently up-regulated. We also found significant differences between the genes and gene sets expressed in diffuse and intestinal type gastric carcinoma. By gene set analysis of cytogenetic bands, we identified many chromosomal regions with possible gross chromosomal changes (amplifications or deletions). Similar analysis of transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), revealed transcription factors that may have caused the observed gene expression changes in gastric carcinomas, and we confirmed the overexpression of one of these, E2F1, in many gastric carcinomas by tissue array and immunohistochemistry. We have incorporated the results of our meta- and gene set analyses into a web accessible database (http://human-genome.kribb.re.kr/stomach/).