PRRGO: A Tool for Visualizing and Mapping Globally Expressed Genes in Public Gene Expression Omnibus RNA-Sequencing Studies to PageRank-scored Gene Ontology Terms

ABSTRACT We herein report PageRankeR Gene Ontology (PRRGO), a downloadable web application that can integrate differentially expressed gene (DEG) data from the gene expression omnibus (GEO) GEO2R web tool with the gene ontology (GO) database [1]. Unlike existing tools, PRRGO computes the PageRank for the entire GO network and can generate both interactive GO networks on the web interface and comma-separated values (CSV) files containing the DEG statistics categorized by GO term. These hierarchical and tabular GO-DEG data are especially conducive to hypothesis generation and overlap studies with the use of PageRank data, which can provide a metric of GO term centrality. We verified the tool for accuracy and reliability across nine independent heat shock (HS) studies for which the RNA-seq data was publicly available on GEO and found that the tool produced increasing concordance between study DEGs, GO terms, and select HS-specific GO terms.