Genomics Goes Online at the Cancer Genomics Browser

Genomics meets the Internet in the form of a valuable new online tool for cancer researchers.

Investigators at the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA) unveiled the "Cancer Genomics Browser" in article in the April 2009 issue of the journal Nature Methods.

The browser is a suite of Web-based tools designed to help researchers find patterns in the huge amounts of clinical and genomic data being gathered in large-scale cancer studies. The Cancer Genomics Browser (see below) shows data as "heatmaps," in which colors represent the values of key variables. Genomic and clinical data are displayed side by side, and researchers can group and sort the data on the basis of any feature of interest, such as age, gender, response to therapy, estrogen-receptor status of breast cancers, and so on. While the initial view of the site is a bit daunting, an eight-minute video tutorial quickly acquaints the novice with the basic features of the browser.

"The ideas behind it are simple, but the result is a pretty powerful tool. It makes it a lot easier to see patterns in the data," said senior author Dr. Ting Wang, postdoctoral researcher in engineering at the University of California, Riverside. "Now that we have the platform, we want to incorporate state-of-the-art algorithms to get the most out of the data."

Related Links:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Cancer Genomics Browser