Stemformatics: Visualisation and sharing ofstem cell gene expression

Genome-scale technologies are increasingly adopted by the stem cell research community, because of thepotential to uncover the molecular events most informative about a stem cell state. These technologies also presentenormous challenges around the sharing and visualisation ofdata derived from different laboratories or under differentexperimental conditions. Stemformatics is an easy to use, publicly accessible portal that hosts a large collection ofexemplar stem cell data. It provides fast visualisation of gene expression across a range of mouse and human datasets, withtransparent links back to the original studies. One difficulty in the analysis of stem cell signatures is the paucity of publicpathways/gene lists relevant to stem cell or developmental biology. Stemformatics provides a simple mechanism tocreate, share and analyse gene sets, providing a repository of community-annotated stem cell gene lists that areinformative about pathways, lineage commitment, and common technical artefacts. Stemformatics can be accessed atstemformatics.org.