Technology advancements provide access to huge amounts of data and today's scientists biggest obstacle is to analyze these data sets in order to make meaningful data-driven decisions. Most importantly, the analytic tools need to be simple enough to be used by biologists that often lack advanced bioinformatic skills; tasks such as annotating a gene list or performing ID conversion can in fact be laborious and error-prone processes.
To address this problem, Yingyao Zhou and collaborators at The Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation have developed an intuitive web resource called METASCAPE, that allows to perform Annotation, ID translation and Enrichment analysis with just a few clicks and without any prior bioinformatic experience.
METASCAPE is available as a Web Version or as a Microsoft Excel plugin: this is very convenient as the analysis can be performed in the original datasheet allowing users to preserve all the information and avoiding the need to merge separate files… Unfortunately, the Microsoft Excel Plugin does not work on Mac systems.
Both a quick guide and a more detailed user manual are available for users to explore and learn about the analysis tools… What are you waiting for? Paste that gene list of yours and start METASCAPING!