TiGER: A database for tissue-specific gene expression and regulation

BACKGROUND: Understanding how genes are expressed and regulated in different tissues is a fundamental and challenging question. However, most of currently available biological databases do not focus on tissue-specific gene regulation. RESULTS: The recent development of computational methods for tissue-specific combinational gene regulation, based on transcription factor binding sites, enables us to perform a large-scale analysis of tissue-specific gene regulation in human tissues. The results are stored in a web database called TiGER (Tissue-specific Gene Expression and Regulation). The database contains three types of data including tissue-specific gene expression profiles, combinatorial gene regulations, and cis-regulatory module (CRM) detections. At present the database contains expression profiles for 19,526 UniGene genes, combinatorial regulations for 7,341 transcription factor pairs and 6,232 putative CRMs for 2,130 RefSeq genes. CONCLUSION: We have developed and made publicly available a database, TiGER, which summarizes and provides large scale data sets for tissue-specific gene expression and regulation in a variety of human tissues. This resource is available at [1].