Omicseq: searching omics data without using metadata

What is it about?

Omicseq is a search engine for omics datasets such as ChIP-seqm RNA-seq and DNase-seq. The key idea is to rank among all the public datasets given a query gene name of pathway name. Unlike existing omics data search tool, Omicseq do not use metadata when prioritizing and displaying datasets of interest. But Rather, it focused on the quantitative content of the datasets, where the real knowledge lives.

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Why is it important?

To effectively navigate among massive amount of omics data, a powerful search engine is indispensable, just like the internet. Unfortunately, all existing search tools for omics data rely almost exclusively on metadata. Such search capability is useful to find a specific type of data such as for a certain cell type, under a specific biological condition. But they are not suitable for mining information or knowledge. For example, Query a gene name against the metadata is meaningless! Omicseq is a novel search engine allows users to search the actual content of the data, not its label (as the metadata). It allows you to ask the question, in which dataset, my gene of interest show unusual behavior, such as high expression and strong binding by a TF. We aim to collect many different gene properties of all genes in the genome, and make them searchable.

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