The Male Fertility Gene Atlas is online

Male Fertility Gene Atlas - MFGA

The Male Fertility Gene Atlas (MFGA) is a public platform for providing a fast, simple and straightforward access to data on OMICs of male infertility and male germ cells. It is developed in the context of the DFG Clinical Research Unit Male Germ Cells: from Genes to Function (CRU326) under the supervision of an interdisciplinary team of physicians, biologists and computer scientists. The MFGA aims to:

  • enable researchers to interpret their OMICS data in the context of relevant published data sets and
  • help reducing the proportion of unexplained cases of male infertility by providing aggregated data for meta-analyses.
Figure 1: Representative result of a MFGA search for exome data of azoospermic, non-obstructive azoospermic, and obstructive azoospermic patients.

All data on the epi-/genetics of male infertility contained in the MFGA have been manually curated. The data sets are tagged with meta information on the publication, data origin, analysis type, processed tissues and cell lines, experimental conditions, species of the subjects and important gene names.

Additionally, annotated images are stored as well as dynamic data tables that can directly be accessed, filtered, sorted and plotted. The structured tagging and annotating enables storing the information in a relational database (MySQL) and thus, very specific filtering operations for information retrieval and aggregation.