terminology

Here are brief definitions of some of the terms that you may see in NextBio:

Biogroup: A collection of genes associated by a specific biological function, pathway, or similar criteria. No numerical information is directly associated with a biogroup. Examples of canonical gene lists represented as biogroups in NextBio include those from the Gene Ontology Consortium and and Broad Institute's MSigDB. Biogroups are automatically correlated to other search and query results. They can be used as the basis for a query to discover experiments with a significant representation of genes common to a biogroup or an experimental investigation.

Bioset: A single set of genes or proteins representing results of experimental analysis, or simply a set of genes that is of interest to a researcher. Typically, a bioset is derived from one experiment identifying genes that were found to be differentially expressed. Biosets have standard fields that are recognized and used for ranking (fold change, p-value, score, rank, correlation), as well as custom fields (any additional column with numerical information — maximum of 5 columns).

Common Genes: A list of overlapping genes between two sets of genes or proteins.

Project: A collection of studies.

Study: A set of biosets that correspond to a single published research paper or a single experiment.

Tag: Standard biomedical or chemistry concepts associated with biosets in a given study. The system uses these as keywords to help identify and index the content of the study for later search and retrieval.