Identification of candidate disease genes

PubMed, the Internet portal of biomedical and life sciences literature, indexed an interesting article, entitled “TOM: a web-based integrated approach for identification of candidate disease genes.” (Nucleic Acids Res. 2006 Jul 1;34(Web Server issue):W285-92). Authors are Rossi S, Masotti D, Nardini C et al, from the Functional Genomics Laboratory and Telethon Facility, DAMA Data Mining for Analysis of DNA Microarrays, Dipartimento di Morfologia ed Embriologia, Ferrara, Italy. The massive production of biological data by means of highly parallel devices like microarrays for gene expression has paved the way to new possible approaches in molecular genetics. Among them the possibility of inferring biological answers by querying large amounts of expression data. Based on this principle, the authors present here TOM, a web-based resource for the efficient extraction of candidate genes for hereditary diseases. This approach allows the geneticist to bypass the costly and time consuming tracing of genetic markers through entire families and might improve the chance of identifying disease genes, particularly for rare diseases. To access the full abstract of the article, click here.