Cell Cycle Gene Sets

Gene Sets from "Genome-wide functional Analysis of human Cell Cycle genes" by Mukherji et al. 2006

To diminish this bias at least to some extent , we curated Gene Lists from the first most likely highly unbiased functional screen for cell cycle genes in a human model system by Mukherji et al 2006 and added these nine Gene Sets to the ~ 3000 Gene Sets from other sources.

Cell Cycle has been studied with whole genome expression microarrays from the early beginning of this high throughput technology. Reasons for this were the great amount of knowledge about cell cycle and the early availiability of reliably sequence information on a sufficient number of well studied cell cycle regulating or related genes. Many of these cell cycle genes had been defined before in the S. cerevisiae - model system, which is perfectly suited for studying cell cycle on a functional level and can be studied with "almost true whole genome microarrays".
This "wealth of prior knowledge bias" is palpable also in this study (but also other papers on "stemness", for this see Ramalho-Santos et al 2002 or Ivanova et al 2002). Since many major cell cycle gene and regulatory hubs are very well understood, much can be said and written about these genes and their context, but not on other, possibly as important genes.

Figure 1: Cell Cycle Gene Sets Figure Modified from Figure 1B Mukherji et al. 2006