Attract: A method for identifying core pathways that define cellular phenotypes

Abstract

attract is a knowledge-driven analytical approach for identifying and annotating the gene-sets that best discriminate between cell phenotypes. attract finds distinguishing patterns within pathways, decomposes pathways into meta-genes representative of these patterns, and then generates synexpression groups of highly correlated genes from the entire transcriptome dataset. attract can be applied to a wide range of biological systems and is freely available as a Bioconductor package and has been incorporated into the MeV software system.