GExplore: a web server for integrated queries of protein domains, gene expression and mutant phenotypes

BACKGROUND: The majority of the genes even in well-studied multi-cellular model organisms have not been functionally characterized yet. Mining the numerous genome wide data sets related to protein function to retrieve potential candidate genes for a particular biological process remains a challenge. DESCRIPTION: GExplore has been developed to provide a user-friendly database interface for data mining at the gene expression/protein function level to help in hypothesis development and experiment design. It supports combinatorial searches for proteins with certain domains, tissue- or developmental stage-specific expression patterns, and mutant phenotypes. GExplore operates on a stand-alone database and has fast response times, which is essential for exploratory searches. The interface is not only user-friendly, but also modular so that it accommodates additional data sets in the future. CONCLUSION: GExplore is an online database for quick mining of data related to gene and protein function, providing a multi-gene display of data sets related to the domain composition of proteins as well as expression and phenotype data. GExplore is publicly available at: http://genome.sfu.ca/gexplore/