Does Any One Know Why And How To Calculate Tissue Specificity Score

Question

[biorepine]

I have 200 genes and 15 tissue RNA-Seq RPKM units (15 mouse tissues). I can see which tissue has high expression compared to others. But why every one calculate tissue specificty score instead of just representing the expression units and is there any easy way to do it ?

Thanx in advance

Answer 1

[Charles Warden]

I don't think there is a single standard way to define tissue specificity. I would probably recommend looking at tools used to define tissue-specific expression for potential ideas.

Off the top of my head, I know that TiGER has a tissue-specificity scores (they used EST data, but you probably could modify a similar type of score for RNA-Seq):

http://bioinfo.wilmer.jhu.edu/tiger/

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/271