Enrichr: interactive and collaborative HTML5 gene list enrichment analysis tool

The paper addresses the need to interpret lists of differentially expressed genes or proteins produced by system-wide profiling of mammalian cells. Such unbiased lists are compared against libraries of gene sets curated from prior knowledge to compute enrichment. The authors present Enrichr, an integrative web-based and mobile software application that adds new gene-set libraries, an alternative approach to ranking enriched terms, and several interactive visualization methods built with the Data Driven Documents (D3) JavaScript library; it can also be embedded into any tool that performs gene list analysis.

To demonstrate its utility, the authors applied Enrichr to nine cancer cell lines, comparing their enrichment signatures with those of matched normal tissues. They observed a common pattern of upregulation of the polycomb group PRC2 and enrichment of the histone mark H3K27me3 across many cancer lines, plus altered Toll-like receptor and interleukin signaling in K562 cells versus normal myeloid CD33+ cells. Enrichr is open source and freely available online, providing accessible visual summaries of the collective functions of gene lists.