PlantGSEA: a gene set enrichment analysis toolkit for plant community

Abstract

Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) is a powerful method for interpreting biological meaning of a list of genes by computing the overlaps with various previously defined gene sets. As one of the most widely used annotations for defining gene sets, Gene Ontology (GO) system has been used in many enrichment analysis tools. EasyGO and agriGO, two GO enrichment analysis toolkits developed by our laboratory, have gained extensive usage and citations since their releases because of their effective performance and consistent maintenance. Responding to the increasing demands of more comprehensive analysis from the users, we developed a web server as an important component of our bioinformatics analysis toolkit, named PlantGSEA, which is based on GSEA method and mainly focuses on plant organisms. In PlantGSEA, 20 290 defined gene sets deriving from different resources were collected and used for GSEA analysis. The PlantGSEA currently supports gene locus IDs and Affymatrix microarray probe set IDs from four plant model species (Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa, Zea mays and Gossypium raimondii). The PlantGSEA is an efficient and user-friendly web server, and now it is publicly accessible at http://structuralbiology.cau.edu.cn/PlantGSEA.