GCgx: transcriptome-wide exploration of the response to glucocorticoids

Abstract

Glucocorticoids are the cornerstone of immunosuppressive and anti-inflammatory therapy in humans, yet the mechanisms of glucocorticoid immunoregulation and toxicity remain unclear. The response to glucocorticoids is highly cell type-dependent, so translating results from different experimental systems into a better understanding of glucocorticoid effects in humans would benefit from rapid access to high-quality data on the response to glucocorticoids by different cell types. We introduce GCgx, a web application that allows investigators to quickly visualize changes in transcript abundance in response to glucocorticoids in a variety of cells and species. The tool is designed to grow by the addition of datasets based on input from the user community. GCgx is implemented in R and HTML and packaged as a Docker image. The tool and its source code are publicly available.