GIANT API: an application programming interface for functional genomics.

Publication Year
2016

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

GIANT API provides biomedical researchers programmatic access to tissue-specific and global networks in humans and model organisms, and associated tools, which includes functional re-prioritization of existing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data. Using tissue-specific interaction networks, researchers are able to predict relationships between genes specific to a tissue or cell lineage, identify the changing roles of genes across tissues and uncover disease-gene associations. Additionally, GIANT API enables computational tools like NetWAS, which leverages tissue-specific networks for re-prioritization of GWAS results. The web services covered by the API include 144 tissue-specific functional gene networks in human, global functional networks for human and six common model organisms and the NetWAS method. GIANT API conforms to the REST architecture, which makes it stateless, cacheable and highly scalable. It can be used by a diverse range of clients including web browsers, command terminals, programming languages and standalone apps for data analysis and visualization. The API is freely available for use at http://giant-api.princeton.edu.

Journal
Nucleic Acids Res
Volume
44
Issue
W1
Pages
W587-92
Date Published
2016 Jul 08
ISSN Number
1362-4962
Alternate Journal
Nucleic Acids Res
PMCID
PMC4987882
PMID
27098035