Over Representation Analysis (ORA)

Modern high-throughput functional genomics technologies are on one hand creating opportunities for exploring new biological frontiers, but on the other hand exhausting the scientific community’ resources to understand the information made available by such technologies. Biologists’ hardship in the face of this large-amount of experimental results calls for an automated tool to generate a high-level view of the inter-relations between existing biological knowledge and new experimental results. This is the place where Over-Representation Analysis (ORA) comes to rescue, helping to identify pathways or gene sets that are over-represented among a list of interesting genes produced from genomics studies, and thus provides biologists much needed computerized assistance in discovering novel genetic functional mechanisms. [@dongLEGONovelMethod2016a]