The Metabolic gEne RApid Visualizer (MERAV) website is designed to analyze human gene expression across a large variety of arrays (4,454 arrays). All the arrays were normalized together to generate a gene expression database composed of the following human tissue types:
normal tissues (726 arrays)
cancer cell lines (2,016 arrays)
primary tumors (1,460 arrays)
non-cancer cell lines (79 arrays)
The gene expression data are normalized across these arrays to provide a means of consistent comparison. The sources for generating this large-scale gene expression database were obtained from:
Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), a joint project between Novartis and the Broad Institute (http://www.broadinstitute.org/LINCS/dataset.html), which genomic profiled 729 cell lines.
Arrayexpress Archive database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/) containing the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) cell lines data, which profiled over 300 cell lines (https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/caArray_GSKdata/).
Gene Expression Omnibus database (GEO) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gds/), Human microarray data publicity available in the NCBI GEO database.
Human Body Index (HBI) that represents the expression data of 426 normal human tissues arrays (Public on April 09, 2007).
Expression Project for Oncology (ExpO) represents data from the expression primary tumor arrays generated by the International Genomic Consortium. All gene expression data were collected and assembled on or before August 25, 2010. The gene names are constantly updated.
Advantages:
All data normalized together.
Parallel search for multiple genes.
Pinpoint and limit the search to selective tissues of interest.
Detailed annotation for each array.
Gene expression can be presented as a heatmap.
Each gene can be linked to the Entrez and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and Genome (KEGG) databases.
Ability to generate a boxplot for each gene in a given sample.
Ability to calculate the correlation in gene expression between genes in a given sample.