DGE-ontology: A quick and simple gene set enrichment analysis and visualisation tool

Abstract

High-throughput quantification techniques provide considerable amounts of data. Making sense of such data requires not only thorough statistical analysis but a logical approach to data visualisation. DGE-ontology is software that has been primarily designed for transcriptomics, however it may be utilised for any data that express fold change of relative or absolute quantity measures of multiple entities, such as transcripts, proteins or metabolites. The software integrates results of differential and functional analyses in order to produce a single circular, highly informative and visually appealing chart. The chart simultaneously depicts numbers of quantified entities, their assignment to functional categories, singles out statistically over-represented categories, and visualises quantity fold change values. The presented approach to data visualisation considerably facilitates communication of experimental results as well as inference from large omic data sets.