Systematic bioinformatic analysis of expression levels of 17,330 human genes across 9,783 samples from 175 types of healthy and pathological tissues

Sami Kilpinen^*¹^,2 , Reija Autio^*³ , Kalle Ojala¹^,2 , Kristiina Iljin¹ , Elmar Bucher¹ , Henri Sara¹ , Tommi Pisto¹ , Matti Saarela³ , Rolf I Skotheim¹^,4 , Mari Björkman¹ , John-Patrick Mpindi¹ , Saija Haapa-Paananen¹ , Paula Vainio¹ , Henrik Edgren¹^,2 , Maija Wolf¹^,2 , Jaakko Astola³ , Matthias Nees¹ , Sampsa Hautaniemi⁵ and Olli Kallioniemi¹^,2

¹Medical Biotechnology, VTT Technical Research Centre and University of Turku, Itäinen pitkäkatu 4C, Turku, Finland

²Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, Tukholmankatu 8, Helsinki, Finland

³Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere, Finland

⁴Department of Cancer Prevention, Institute for Cancer Research, Rikshospitalet-Radiumhospitalet Medical Centre, Oslo, NO-0310, Norway

⁵Computational Systems Biology Laboratory, Institute of Biomedicine and Genome-Scale Biology Research Program, University of Helsinki, Haartmaninkatu 8, Finland

author email corresponding author email* Contributed equally

Genome Biology 2008, 9:R139doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-9-r139


Published:	19 September 2008

Subject areas: Medicine, Cancer, Genome studies, Bioinformatics

Abstract

Our knowledge on tissue- and disease-specific functions of human genes is rather limited and highly context-specific. Here, we have developed a method for the comparison of mRNA expression levels of most human genes across 9,783 Affymetrix gene expression array experiments representing 43 normal human tissue types, 68 cancer types, and 64 other diseases. This database of gene expression patterns in normal human tissues and pathological conditions covers 113 million datapoints and is available from the GeneSapiens website.