A Glimpse into the Applications of Bioinformatics in Gene Expression Studies

One of the major benefits of bioinformatics in medicine is to facilitate the identification of the regulatory mechanisms involved in human disease. Investigation of gene expression differences between healthy and diseased individuals is widely used to reveal aberrantly expressed genes in diseased cells. Several methods have been applied to quantify gene expression levels, such as DNA microarrays, RNA-seq, MPSS, SAGE and others. While DNA microarrays are hybridization-based approaches, RNA-seq, MPSS and SAGE are some of the sequencing based technologies. Each technology has advantages and disadvantages over others.