GSA Central—A web platform to perform, learn, and discuss gene set analysis

Abstract

Gene Set Analysis (GSA) is one of the most commonly used strategies to analyze omics data. Hundreds of GSA-related papers have been published, giving birth to a GSA field in Bioinformatics studies. However, as the field grows, it is becoming more difficult to obtain a clear view of all available methods, resources, and their quality. In this paper, we introduce a web platform called “GSA Central” which, as its name indicates, acts as a focal point to centralize GSA information and tools useful to beginners, average users, and experts in the GSA field. “GSA Central” contains five different resources: A Galaxy instance containing GSA tools (“Galaxy-GSA”), a portal to educational material (“GSA Classroom”), a comprehensive database of articles (“GSARefDB”), a set of benchmarking tools (“GSA BenchmarKING”), and a blog (“GSA Blog”). We expect that “GSA Central” will become a useful resource for users looking for introductory learning, state-of-the-art updates, method/tool selection guidelines and insights, tool usage, tool integration under a Galaxy environment, tool design, and tool validation/benchmarking. Moreover, we expect this kind of platform to become an example of a “thematic platform” containing all the resources that people in the field might need, an approach that could be extended to other bioinformatics topics or scientific fields.