title: ImmuSort, a database on gene plasticity and electronic sorting for immune cells.
abstract: Gene expression is highly dynamic and plastic. We present a new immunological database, ImmuSort. Unlike other gene expression databases, ImmuSort provides a convenient way to view global differential gene expression data across thousands of experimental conditions in immune cells. It enables electronic sorting, which is a bioinformatics process to retrieve cell states associated with specific experimental conditions that are mainly based on gene expression intensity. A comparison of gene expression profiles reveals other applications, such as the evaluation of immune cell biomarkers and cell subsets, identification of cell specific and/or disease-associated genes or transcripts, comparison of gene expression in different transcript variants and probe set quality evaluation. A plasticity score is introduced to measure gene plasticity. Average rank and marker evaluation scores are used to evaluate biomarkers. The current version includes 31 human and 17 mouse immune cell groups, comprising 10,422 and 3,929 microarrays derived from public databases, respectively. A total of 20,283 human and 20,963 mouse genes are available to query in the database. Examples show the distinct advantages of the database. The database URL is http://202.85.212.211/Account/ImmuSort.html.
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Immunology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University Health Science Center. Key Laboratory of Medical Immunology, Ministry of Health, China. Peking University Center for Human Disease Genomics. No. 38 Xueyuan Road, Beijing, 100191, China [2] Chinese National Human Genome Center at Beijing. No. 3-707 North YongChang Road, BDA, Beijing, 100176, China.
authors.forename: Pingzhang
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Tip-Science(Beijing) Bioinformatics Co. Ltd. The current affiliation: Institute of Basic Medical Sciences Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. No. 5 Dong Dan San Tiao, Beijing, 10005, China.
authors.forename: Yehong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Department of Immunology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University Health Science Center. Key Laboratory of Medical Immunology, Ministry of Health, China. Peking University Center for Human Disease Genomics. No. 38 Xueyuan Road, Beijing, 100191, China.
authors.forename: Wenling
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: Department of Immunology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University Health Science Center. Key Laboratory of Medical Immunology, Ministry of Health, China. Peking University Center for Human Disease Genomics. No. 38 Xueyuan Road, Beijing, 100191, China.
authors.forename: Dalong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ma
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D015415:Biomarkers; D000066670:Cell Plasticity / Q000235:genetics* / Q000276:immunology*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D051379:Mice; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D059467:Transcriptome / Q000235:genetics / Q000276:immunology*
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers