Manteia, a predictive data mining system for vertebrate genes and its applications to human genetic diseases

The function of genes is often evolutionarily conserved, and comparing the annotation of ortholog genes in different model organisms has proved to be a powerful predictive tool to identify the function of human genes. Here, we describe Manteia, a resource available online at http://manteia.igbmc.fr. Manteia allows the comparison of embryological, expression, molecular and etiological data from human, mouse, chicken and zebrafish simultaneously to identify new functional and structural correlations and gene-disease associations. Manteia is particularly useful for the analysis of gene lists produced by high-throughput techniques such as microarrays or proteomics. Data can be easily analyzed statistically to characterize the function of groups of genes and to correlate the different aspects of their annotation. Sophisticated querying tools provide unlimited ways to merge the information contained in Manteia along with the possibility of introducing custom user-designed biological questions into the system. This allows for example to connect all the animal experimental results and annotations to the human genome, and take advantage of data not available for human to look for candidate genes responsible for genetic disorders. Here, we demonstrate the predictive and analytical power of the system to predict candidate genes responsible for human genetic diseases.