GenRank: a R/Bioconductor package for prioritization of candidate genes

Abstract

Modern high-throughput studies often yield long lists of genes, a fraction of which are of high relevance to the phenotype of interest. To prioritize the candidate genes of complex genetic traits, our R/Bioconductor package GenRank ranks genes based on convergent evidence obtained from multiple layers of independent evidence. We implemented three methods to rank genes that integrate gene-level data generated from multiple layers of evidence: (a) the convergent evidence (CE) method aggregates evidence based on a weighted vote counting method; (b) the rank product (RP) method performs a meta-analysis of microarray-based gene expression data, and (c) the traditional method combines p-values. The methods are implemented in R and are available as a package in the Bioconductor repository ( http://bioconductor.org/packages/GenRank/ ).