T-STAG: resource and web-interface for tissue-specific transcripts and genes

T-STAG (tissue-specific transcripts and genes) is a resource and web-interface, designated to analyze tissue/tumor-specific expression patterns in human and mouse transcriptomes. It integrates our refined prediction of specific expression patterns both in genes as well as in individual isoforms with man-mouse orthology data. In combination with the features for combining/contrasting the genes expressed in different tissues, T-STAG implicates important biological applications, such as the detection of differentially expressed genes in tumors, the retrieval of orthologs with significant expression in the same tissue etc. Additionally, our refined categorization of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) according to the normalization of cDNA libraries allows searching for putative low-abundant transcripts. The results are tightly linked to our visualization tools, GeneNest (expression patterns of genes) and SpliceNest (gene structure and alternative splicing). The user-friendly interface of T-STAG offers a platform for comprehensive analysis of tissue and/or tumor-specific expression patterns revealed by the EST data. T-STAG is freely accessible at http://tstag.molgen.mpg.de.