KPP: KEGG Pathway Painter

Abstract

Background: High-throughput technologies became common tools to decipher genome-wide changes of gene expression (GE) patterns. Functional analysis of GE patterns is a daunting task as it requires often recourse to the public repositories of biological knowledge. On the other hand, in many cases researcher's inquiry can be served by a comprehensive glimpse. The KEGG PATHWAY database is a compilation of manually verified maps of biological interactions represented by the complete set of pathways related to signal transduction and other cellular processes. Rapid mapping of the differentially expressed genes to the KEGG pathways may provide an idea about the functional relevance of the gene lists corresponding to the high-throughput expression data. Results: Here we present a web based graphic tool KEGG Pathway Painter (KPP). KPP paints pathways from the KEGG database using large sets of the candidate genes accompanied by "overexpressed" or "underexpressed" marks, for example, those generated by microarrays or miRNA profilings. Conclusion: KPP provides fast and comprehensive visualization of the global GE changes by consolidating a list of the color-coded candidate genes into the KEGG pathways. KPP is freely available and can be accessed at http://web.cos.gmu.edu/~gmanyam/kegg/