GeneNetwork Tutorial

For up to date issues or problems with this database please see the wiki.
For more information, please visit GeneNetwork.

GeneNetwork is not a simple data set that is accessed; it is a large array of tools that can be used on top of public datasets as well as data that the user uploads.

Most data come from microarray experiments and are available to be analyzed.  NIF brings the user to a portion of that dataset, which specifically fit the users query, but we do not expect that a novice user will be able to utilize the tools available immediately.  

This tutorial is meant only as a basic primer on the data that can be found in GeneNetwork and how to get to it from NIF.

With that caveat, we can begin by searching for genes and brain regions, here we use the gene: search and we add a brain region to reduce the number of results.

Note that the gene: search produces a search of all known synonyms for the GRM1 gene.

Looking down into the category labeled genes, we find the GeneNetwork results for this gene brain region combination.  The summary data includes the gene name, a locus description, the tissue where it was obtained, as well as the species and the originating database. 

Clicking on the first result takes the user to the GeneNetwork database for that experiment.  Note, the results from many experiments may be displayed, showing essentially the same thing, in this case that GRM1 is expressed in cerebellum, but if you look closely at the Chromosome location, you can see that the numbers are not identical, in fact these are two separate experiments.

In GeneNetwork, once can find the various general descriptive data that we saw in NIF, but also many links to related datasets for this gene/locus.

Below the summary data, we find an array of trait data statistics, which can be altered and analyzed using a set of powerful tools.

Because the tools are not completely intuitive to the novice user, we suggest strongly that the user take some time and view one or more of the tutorials available under the GeneNetwork help section.

For more information, please visit GeneNetwork.