All of gene expression (AOE): An integrated index for public gene expression databases

Abstract

Gene expression data have been archived as microarray and RNA-seq datasets in two public databases, Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and ArrayExpress (AE). In 2018, the DNA DataBank of Japan started a similar repository called the Genomic Expression Archive (GEA). These databases are useful resources for the functional interpretation of genes, but have been separately maintained and may lack RNA-seq data, while the original sequence data are available in the Sequence Read Archive (SRA). We constructed an index for those gene expression data repositories, called All Of gene Expression (AOE), to integrate publicly available gene expression data. The web interface of AOE can graphically query data in addition to the application programming interface. By collecting gene expression data from RNA-seq in the SRA, AOE also includes data not included in GEO and AE. AOE is accessible as a search tool from the GEA website and is freely available at https://aoe.dbcls.jp/.