Print

How can I find tissue-specific expression data for a gene of interest at NCBI?

Tissue-specific gene expression data are now displayed on Gene database records for human, mouse, and rat*. To find these data, do the following:

  • Locate the gene of interest in the Gene database (example).
  • Scroll down to the Expression section (or click from the Table of contents).
  • Use the pull down menu located at the top of the section to learn about the included studies:
    • Select BioProject link to access the study metadata in the BioProject database.
    • Select the Publication link to access the citation information for the published study in the PubMed database.
  • To see more information, click the See details link located at the top right of the Expression section. (Alternatively, change the record's display to Expression using the display menu located on the left at the top of the Full Report.)
  • The full Expression page (example) contains a tabular view that provides the following:
    • Total count of reads mapped to gene transcript features
    • Reads per kilobase per million reads placed (RPKM)
    • Tissue/sample information: click on the plus sign at the tissue of your interest to display the BioSample accession numbers/links of the included samples
    • Links to the relevant records in the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and the BioSample database
    • A Download button (located at the top right of the page) to download the mean RPKM per tissue for the selected study

*See instructions on using expression tracks in the graphical Sequence Viewer (or the Genome Data Viewer) if:
— You are working with genes from another organism (not human, mouse, or rat) that will not have the expression report
— If you working with a human/mouse/rat gene but you want to visualize he RNA-seq expression coverage graphs for each sample used to compute expression levels
— If you want to examine the expression tracks for additional RNA_Seq studies for human/mouse/rat that are not included in the expression report page.