PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Laura Cantini
AU  - Laurence Calzone
AU  - Loredana Martignetti
AU  - Mattias Rydenfelt
AU  - Nils Blüthgen
AU  - Emmanuel Barillot
AU  - Andrei Zinovyev
TI  - Classification of gene signatures for their information value and functional redundancy
AID  - 10.1101/136499
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 136499
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/10/136499.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/10/136499.full
AB  - Large collections of gene signatures play a pivotal role in interpreting results of omics data analysis but suffer from compositional (large overlap) and functional (redundant read-outs) redundancy, and many gene signatures rarely pop-up in statistical tests. Based on pan-cancer data analysis, here we define a restricted set of 962 so called informative signatures and demonstrate that they have more chances to appear highly enriched in cancer biology studies. We show that the majority of informative signatures conserve their weights for the composing genes (eigengenes) from one cancer type to another. We construct InfoSigMap, an interactive online map showing the structure of compositional and functional redundancies between informative signatures and charting the territories of biological functions accessible through transcriptomic studies. InfoSigMap can be used to visualize in one insightful picture the results of comparative omics data analyses and suggests reconsidering existing annotations of certain reference gene set groups.