Bioinformatics

FUN-L: gene prioritization for RNAi screens

Lees, J. G., Heriche, J.-K., Morilla, I., Fernandez, J. M., Adler, P., Krallinger, M., Vilo, J., Valencia, A., Ellenberg, J., Ranea, J. A., Orengo, C..

Motivation: Most biological processes remain only partially characterized with many components still to be identified. Given that a whole genome can usually not be tested in a functional assay, identifying the genes most likely to be of interest is of critical importance to avoid wasting resources.

Results: Given a set of known functionally related genes and using a state-of-the-art approach to data integration and mining, our Functional Lists (FUN-L) method provides a ranked list of candidate genes for testing. Validation of predictions from FUN-L with independent RNAi screens confirms that FUN-L-produced lists are enriched in genes with the expected phenotypes. In this article, we describe a website front end to FUN-L.

Availability and implementation: The website is freely available to use at http://funl.org

Contact: ucbcjle@live.ucl.ac.uk