KEGGanalys

KEGGanalys is a web-based tool designed for the analysis of biological pathways. It is part of the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) suite of tools, which aims to systematically organize and interpret the vast amount of information generated by genome sequencing and other high-throughput experimental technologies. KEGGanalys specifically focuses on mapping gene expression data or lists of genes onto known KEGG pathways.

The primary function of KEGGanalys is to identify which biological pathways are significantly enriched or over-represented in a given set of genes. This is crucial for understanding the biological context of experimental results, such as those from transcriptomic studies. Users can upload a list of genes, often differentially expressed genes from an experiment, and the tool will compare this list against the genes annotated within various KEGG pathways.

The analysis typically involves statistical methods to determine if the observed overlap between the user's gene list and a pathway's gene set is more than what would be expected by chance. Pathways that show a statistically significant enrichment are considered to be relevant to the biological condition under investigation. The output of KEGGanalys usually includes a list of enriched pathways, along with associated statistics like p-values or false discovery rates, and often links to the specific KEGG pathway maps for visualization. This facilitates the interpretation of large-scale biological data by highlighting key molecular mechanisms and cellular processes that may be affected.