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Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have developed a critical hub for functional genomics and immune cell research. LJI Assistant Professor Miguel Reina-Campos directs the new Functional Immunogenomics and Transcriptomics database (FITdb), a freely accessible resource that brings together functional genomics datasets for immune cell investigations.

"We designed FITdb to be extremely user-friendly," says Reina-Campos. "This is a very intuitive and fast platform for immunologists aiming to understand the immune cells, genomes and proteins they are working with."

With FITdb, researchers can enter the name of a gene and learn how its functional perturbation affects immune cell function. Or scientists can go in the opposite direction, exploring which genes or regulators may make promising targets for manipulating immune cells to better fight cancers or even viruses.

FITdb currently integrates data from 43 independent functional genetics screens, including 31 bulk and 12 single-cell screens, spanning 20,696 mouse genes and 22,293 human genes across 199 immune cell types and cell states across 29 conditions.

"Now you don't need to look through hundreds of papers and comb through the supplementary files to find that information," says Reina-Campos.

Reina-Campos and his LJI colleagues recently shared their work in Nucleic Acids Research . They highlight the FITdb tools "Compare MyGeneSet," which reveals overlaps between user-defined gene lists and functional gene sets in FITdb, and "Compare MyScreen," which lets scientists directly compare user-generated screening data with existing datasets.

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