uGPA: unified Gene Pathway Analyzer package for high-throughput genome-wide screening data provides mechanistic overview on human diseases

• uGPA obtains mechanistic overview of diseases in assisting personalized therapy.
• It can study mutational and gene expressional perspectives of human diseases.
• It provides unified solution to both genomic and transcriptomic screening data.
• It accepts screening data derived from NGS-based and microarray-based platforms.
• It runs in different operating systems and requires minimal bioinformatics skill.

BackgroundGene set or pathway analysis (GPA) can provide a comprehensive mechanistic overview in delineating molecular pathoetiology of human diseases. Existing tools that can handle for GPA on both mutational and gene expressional aspects are limited. This leads to the development of uGPA (unified Gene Pathway Analyzer).MethodsuGPA package provides a unified solution to knowledge base-driven competitive GPA that can analyze genome-wide screening data derived from multiple platforms (next generation sequencing or microarray) and sample sources (genomic or transcriptomic) on both mutational and gene expressional perspectives. It allows for a quick assessment of perspective outline of gene sets on the studied disease through enrichment test modeled by cumulative hypergeometric distribution and reports the gene components detected with events (mutation or differential gene expression) in the gene sets.ResultsuGPA package has been successfully verified to be applicable on input data generated from NGS-based platforms (transcriptome sequencing and whole-exome sequencing). Genome-wide screening data from other platforms should also apply.ConclusionsuGPA package delivers a simple, flexible and platform-independent functionality to multiple aspects of GPA. It equips clinicians and scientists with a useful tool in studying molecular mechanism of human diseases using modern high-throughput genome-wide screening strategy, which assists personalized therapy.