iGepros: an integrated gene and protein annotation server for biological nature exploration

Abstract

Abstract Background In the post-genomic era, transcriptomics and proteomics provide important information to understand the genomes. With fast development of high-throughput technology, more and more transcriptomics and proteomics data are generated at an unprecedented rate. Therefore, requirement of software to annotate those omics data and explore their biological nature arises. In the past decade, some pioneer works were presented to address this issue, but limitations still exist. Fox example, some of these tools offer command line only, which is not suitable for those users with little or no experience in programming. Besides, some tools don’t support large scale gene and protein analysis. Results To overcome these limitations, an integrated gene and protein annotation server named iGepros has been developed. The server provides user-friendly interfaces and detailed on-line examples, so most researchers even those with little or no programming experience can use it smoothly. Moreover, the server provides many functionalities to compare transcriptomics and proteomics data. Especially, the server is constructed under a model-view-control framework, which makes it easy to incorporate more functions to the server in the future. Conclusions In this paper, we present a server with powerful capability not only for gene and protein functional annotation, but also for transcriptomics and proteomics data comparison. Researchers can survey biological characters behind gene and protein datasets and accelerate their investigation of transcriptome and proteome by applying the server. The server is publicly available at http://www.biosino.org/iGepros/.