BIGO: A web application to analyse gene enrichment analysis results

Abstract

Background and objective: Gene enrichment tools enable the analysis of the relationships between genes with biological annotations stored in biological databases. The results obtained by these tools are usually difficult to analyse. Therefore, researchers require new tools with friendly user interfaces available on all types of devices and new methods to make the analysis of the results easier.

Methods: In this work, we present the BIGO Web tool. BIGO is a friendly Web tool to perform enrichment analyses of a collection of gene sets. On the basis of the obtained enrichment analysis results, BIGO combines the biological terms to organize them and graphically represents the relationships between gene sets to make the interpretations of the results easier.

Results: BIGO offers useful services that provide the opportunity to focus on a concrete subset of results by discarding too general biological terms or to obtain useful knowledge by means of the visual analysis of the functional connections between the sets of genes being analysed.

Conclusions: BIGO is a web tool with a novel and modern design that provides the possibility to improve the analysis tasks applied to gene enrichment results.