NOMA-DB: a framework for management and analysis of ageing-related gene-expression data

Recently there is a growing interest for the study of the molecular basis of ageing processes and on the differences among genders. These studies require many data, models and tools for inferring molecular mechanisms. Among the others, the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) database is one of the prominent resources for the analysis of expression data related to tissues, sex and age. The current version of the database has a lot of querying interfaces that enable many analysis centred on the expression of genes on tissues. Despite this, the database lacks on the analysis at sex/age level, thus the researcher has to download data and then write queries by hand (e.g. for retrieving the expression of a given gene on different age-class in many tissues). It also lacks on the integration with existing protein interaction data. Therefore, the need for the introduction of tools enabling easy access and powerful analysis capabilities (i.e. state of the art network based analysis and integration), arises. We here present NOMA-DB, a framework for ageing studies based on an extension of the GTEx database that enable easy querying at sex/age level, network based analysis. The framework is based on wrapping the GTEx database and on building an application logic level on top of existing data. The current version enables the analysis of genes by tissue, gene and age, thus it may be used in potentially future directions of analysis towards better comprehension of aging/sex-related molecular processes based on the analysis of expression data.