BIOINFORMATICS TOOLS FOR GENE LIST ANALYSIS
The advent of the era of high-throughput sequencing has brought a wealth of biological data to researchers, but the vastness of the available data has created a demand for tools that could be used to analyze it. One such type of tools are gene set analysis tools, that take a list of genes that were found to be up or down regulated during an experiment. For the sake of simplicity this review focuses solely on freely available web based tools that have been published or have undergone significant updates in the last 5 years. This review is meant to assist tool developers to better understand the needs of the end-users, and in it we look at the currently available gene list analysis tools, their strengths and weaknesses, and offer suggestions for their improvement. Key words: microarray, gene set, systems biology, enrichment, gene ontology