Construction of a searchable database for gene expression changes in spinal cord injury experiments

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a debilitating disease resulting in an estimated 18,000 new cases in the United States on an annual basis. Significant behavioral research on animal models has led to a large amount of data, some of which has been catalogued in the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (ODC-SCI). More recently, high throughput sequencing experiments have been utilized to understand molecular mechanisms associated with SCI, with nearly 6,000 samples from over 90 studies available in the Sequence Read Archive. However, to date, no resource is available for efficiently mining high throughput sequencing data from SCI experiments. Therefore, we have developed a protocol for processing RNA-Seq samples from high-throughput sequencing experiments related to SCI resulting in both raw and normalized data that can be efficiently mined for comparisons across studies as well as homologous discovery across species. We have processed 1,196 publicly available RNA-seq samples from 50 bulk RNA-Seq studies across nine different species, resulting in an SQLite database that can be used by the SCI research community for further discovery. We provide both the database as well as a web-based front-end that can be used to query the database for genes of interest, differential gene expression, genes with high variance, and gene set enrichments.