An anatomy of normal and malignant gene expression.

A gene's expression pattern provides clues to its role in normal physiology and disease. To provide quantitative expression levels on a genome-wide scale, the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project (CGAP) uses serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE). Over 5 million transcript tags from more than 100 human cell types have been assembled. To enhance the utility of this data, the CGAP SAGE project created SAGE Genie, a web site for the analysis and presentation of SAGE data (http://cgap.nci.nih.gov/SAGE). SAGE Genie provides an automatic link between gene names and SAGE transcript levels, accounting for alternative transcription and many potential errors. These informatics advances provide a rapid and intuitive view of transcript expression in the human body or brain, displayed on the SAGE Anatomic Viewer. We report here an easily accessible view of nearly any gene's expression in a wide variety of malignant and normal tissues.