BarleyBase/PLEXdb

Abstract

BarleyBase (http://barleybase.org/) and its successor, PLEXdb (http://plexdb.org/), are public resources for large-scale gene expression analysis for plants and plant pathogens. BarleyBase/PLEXdb provides a unified web interface to support the functional interpretation of highly parallel microarray experiments integrated with traditional structural genomics and phenotypic data. Users can perform hypothesis building queries from multiple interlinked resources, e.g., a particular gene, a protein class, EST entries, and physical or genetic map position-all coupled to highly parallel gene expression, for a variety of crop and model plant species, from a large array of experimental or field conditions. Array data are interlinked to analytical and biological functions (e.g., Gene and Plant Ontologies, BLAST, spliced alignment, multiple alignment, regulatory motif identification, and expression analysis), allowing members of the community to access and analyze comparative expression experiments in conjunction with their own data.