Gene-expression omnibus integration and clustering tools in SeqExpress

SeqExpress, a gene-expression analysis suite, has been extended to offer a number of cluster generation, refinement and visualization techniques. The cluster generation methods have been specialized to deal with aspects of the sparseness and extreme values that occur within microarray data. The results of such cluster analysis can then be refined using either: a functional enrichment based procedure, which examines each cluster to see if it possesses an unusually high or low concentration of ontology terms; or by using Expectation-Maximization to find a mixture of model based distributions within the datasets. Visualizations are provided both to explore and compare the results of the cluster generation algorithms. In addition, a tool has been developed which integrates SeqExpress with the Gene-Expression Omnibus repository. The tool provides seamless access to the large number of experimental results in the repository, so that they can be visualized and analysed locally using SeqExpress.