Last February, we added gene expression data to Gene. Now, you can access these data in a few new ways.

Expression pattern “teasers” in Summary

We’ve added a brief sentence describing the expression pattern to the Summary section. This teaser sentence describes tissue-specific expression of the gene, with a link to the complete description that appears in the Expression section.

Querying for specific expression patterns

You can search for genes with expression patterns (patterns described in Gene News) using the “expression category” prefix.

For example, to query for genes that are expressed in all samples, you can use:

“expression category ubiquitous expression”[Properties]

To find genes with expression data, regardless of category, use:

“has expression data”[Properties]

Specifying tissue names in search

You can specify tissue names as they appear in the expression data. Tissue names may contain multiple words, and searches may specify some or all words. For example, you can use this query

mouse[orgn] liver[expression/tissues]

to find mouse genes expressed in liver at any of the 4 developmental stages represented in the primary mouse dataset, whereas this query

mouse[orgn] “liver E14.5″[expression/tissues]

will be restricted to just the one time-point.

Finally, you can put these together to find genes with restricted expressed in liver in mouse:

mouse[organism] “expression category restricted expression”[Properties] liver[expression/tissues]

We’ve expanded the data, initially available for human, mouse, and rat, to include pig, rice, and Nile tilapia. We plan to add other commonly used organisms.

Further details are in Gene News and the documentation.

• What's New