Compendium of immune signatures to improve Gene Set Enrichment Analysis

Researchers Nick Haining and Jernej Godec of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Broad Institute collaborated with Broad and UC San Francisco computational biologists to build a collection of gene signatures from different immune cell types and perturbations. The collection, called ImmuneSigDB, includes almost 5,000 new gene sets and has been added to MSigDB. The additions are expected to greatly improve the use of Gene Set Enrichment Analysis for immunological studies; in a paper published by the journal Immunity, the team uses the collection to identify species-specific and shared aspects of the biology of the immune response to sepsis between mice and humans.