Overview of Knetminer

Genetic and transcriptomics studies are only the beginning of every gene discovery investigation to determine genes, biological processes and pathways underlying complex, polygenic traits. The challenges of evaluating the functional candidacy of potential candidate genes include data acquisition, integration, mining and visualisation. KnetMiner gives domain experts (biologists, breeders) the required tools to interpret genes and QTL, and to refine an original hypothesis or define new hypotheses through the exploration of biological knowledge networks. The KnetMiner web server rapidly searches and evaluates a vast amount of heterogeneous relations and knowledge types to determine if direct or indirect links between genes and trait-related keywords can be established. It produces a table of ranked candidate genes and allows users to explore the output in highly interactive genome and network maps. Here, we present a KnetMiner use case to unveil genes and networks controlling flowering related traits in Arabidopsis by integrating and mining several datasets including public GWAS and protein-protein interaction data. KnetMiner is free, open-source and available at http://knetminer.rothamsted.ac.uk/.