Whether you are measuring mRNA expression, protein expression, DNA methylation, expressed miRNAs, protein binding to DNA or RNA, etc., you will likely end up with a list of genes or gene products from which you would like to derive functional relationships. In the -omics world, functional enrichment analysis is an umbrella term encompassing approaches used to derive biological / functional meaning from gene lists. This lesson, which is the first of three lessons focused on "pathway analysis", introduces concepts, methods, tools, and databases related to functional enrichment and pathway analysis. This is NOT a hands-on lesson. 

DAVID (the Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery) provides a comprehensive set of functional annotation tools for investigators to understand the biological meaning behind large lists of genes acquired from high-throughput assays such as RNA-Seq, Proteomics, Microarray, etc. This hands-on lesson will show attendees how to use and interpret results from DAVID using an example gene list. 

Reactome is a free, open-source, curated and peer-reviewed pathway database that includes bioinformatics tools for the visualization, interpretation and analysis of pathway knowledge. This lesson will showcase the capabilities of Reactome in garnering biological meaning from an example gene list derived from differential expression results.