E.PathDash, pathway activation analysis of publicly available pathogen gene expression data

Chronic respiratory illnesses impose a high disease burden on our communities and people with respiratory diseases are susceptible to robust bacterial infections from pathogens, including <i>Pseudomonas aeruginosa</i> and <i>Staphylococcus aureus</i>, that contribute to morbidity and mortality. Public gene expression datasets generated from these and other pathogens are abundantly available and an important resource for synthesizing existing pathogenic research, leading to interventions that improve patient outcomes. However, it can take many hours or weeks to render publicly available datasets usable; significant time and skills are needed to clean, standardize, and apply reproducible and robust bioinformatic pipelines to the data. Through collaboration with two microbiologists, we have shown that E.PathDash addresses this problem, enabling them to elucidate pathogen responses to a variety of over 400 experimental conditions and generate mechanistic hypotheses for cell-level behavior in response to disease-relevant exposures, all in a fraction of the time.