RefEx (
https://refex.dbcls.jp/) is Reference Expression Dataset for functional curation of transcriptomes.
RefEx is a challenge to achieve the reference of mammalian tissue gene expression data by different types of methods such as expressed sequence tag (as EST), microarray (as GeneChip), Cap Analysis Gene Expression(as CAGE) and RNA-seq for human, mouse and rat. Recently,
CAGE data from
The FANTOM5 project which is a broad atlas of human and mouse gene expression in tissues, primary cells and cell lines is included in RefEx.
The main use cases of RefEx are the following three points.
- examine the pattern of gene expression in normal tissues of the body, cells and celllines.
- one-click search for tissue specific genes.
- compare the differences of gene expression levels by experimental methods.
You can easily check the gene expression profiles of unfamiliar genes from the actual measurement data rather than only description in the paper.