Are you a scientist or public health lab professional studying viral host response? Do you find it challenging to find high-quality curated information on gene expression studies from viral host response to advance and deepen your insights and accelerate your research? Or maybe you need a way to combine all the potentially valuable data you find in the public domain but don’t know where to start? QIAGEN Discovery Bioinformatics Services is launching a new offering that makes such data readily available with only a few clicks of your mouse. QIAGEN Viral Land represents a highly curated and re-processed collection of high-value human viral host and viral vaccine RNA-seq and microarray expression data, harmonized into a single platform. This dataset represents 201 projects, spanning over 15,000 samples examining viral-host and vaccine research, with the ultimate goal of helping researchers and academic and public health labs generate hypotheses using the wealth of data available in the public domain. This new gene expression database on viral studies leverages a simple-to-use web portal, known as QIAGEN OmicSoft Land Explorer, to:
- Mine public studies, and simultaneously examine existing studies on viral host response to find similar changes between different viruses
- Explore differential gene expression and perform on-demand analyses without the need for time-consuming data processing and sample annotation
- Quickly validate experimental results, and confirm they can be reproduced in similar studies, thanks to custom annotations of study attributes and experimental variables
The new Viral Land delivers web-based access to public gene expression studies. The samples are easily visualized and can be grouped or filtered by sample annotations, such as study type (used for host response or vaccine response), virus classifications, tissue, cell type and more.
The Land Explorer web design allows you to interrogate the expression of one or more genes in a single public study as well as multiple studies that have been processed in the same way. For example, IL6 is highly expressed in tissues from hosts infected with coronavirus and influenza (Blanco-Melo D. et al.; Figure 1 left). Further examination of a collection of eight viral host studies checking for IL6 expression reveals that IL6 is also highly expressed in blood derived from individuals infected with Zika and dengue relative to uninfected.
Figure 1. IL6 expression is easily interrogated in infected and control samples from a single study (GSE147507, left) or multiple studies (right).
Accelerate your antiviral host response research. Request a consultation on Viral Land from our experts today, and visit us here for more information about QIAGEN Discovery Bioinformatics Services.
Reference:
Blanco-Melo D., et al. (2020) Imbalanced Host Response to SARS-CoV-2 Drives Development of COVID-19. Cell 181(5):1036-1045.