Functional analysis of legume genome arrays

Functional analysis of post-genomics data is essential to identify the biological processes involved in a given investigation. Although most of the ontological tools available are limited to organisms with well-annotated genomes, this chapter provides an overview of two complementary tools-MapMan and GeneBins/PathExpress-that are used to perform a functional analysis of legume gene expression data. MapMan is a stand-alone tool that displays large datasets onto diagrams of metabolic pathways or other processes. Although initially developed for Arabidopsis thaliana, MapMan can be extended to other plants by assigning new sequences to their orthologs in the current classification. GeneBins and PathExpress have been developed to perform enrichment analysis of functional groups and metabolic networks, respectively. Based on the KEGG database, these tools can be used with any organism, including the main reference legumes.