Prioritized functional analysis of biological experiments using resampling and noise control methodologies

StRAnGER is a web application for the automated statistical analysis of annotated experiments, exploiting controlled biological vocabularies, like the Gene Ontology or the KEGG pathways terms. In the first version, StRAnGER featured various gene profiling platforms for functional analysis of genomic datasets, starting from a list of significant genes derived from statistical and empirical thresholds. In the current version, various major improvements have been implemented, namely a new ranking algorithm, the expansion of background distributions with protein annotations, the addition of a mode for batch experiments and a noise-control analysis that evaluates the robustness of the prioritized terms through iterative addition of random genes. Overall, StRAnGER enables a systems level functional interpretation through the utilization of bootstrapping techniques and the detection of distribution-independent term enrichments.