How MAPPFinder works. Microarray data is imported into MAPPFinder as a GenMAPP gene-expression dataset. Using a relational database and the gene-association files from GO, MAPPFinder assigns the thousands of genes in the dataset to the thousands of GO terms. Using a user-defined criterion for a significant gene-expression change, MAPPFinder calculates the percentage of genes meeting the criterion and a statistical score for each GO term. Using the ranked list and GO browser generated by MAPPFinder the user can quickly identify interesting GO terms with high levels of gene-expression changes. The specific genes involved in these GO terms can be examined on automatically generated MAPPs using GenMAPP.
Doniger et al. Genome Biology 2003 4:R7 doi:10.1186/gb-2003-4-1-r7