Yi Zhang, Belinda Giardine, Cathy Riemer, Laura Elnitski, Prachi Shah, Scott Schwartz, Matt Weirauch, James Taylor, Webb Miller, and Ross C. HardisonCenter for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802
GALA is a set of relational databases that allow users to explore sequence alignments and annotations of the rat, mouse and human genomes. GALA supports simple and complex queries on properties related to alignments, such as likelihood of being under purifying selection or similarity to regulatory regions, and on extensive annotations, such as genes, expression patterns, and conserved transcription factor binding sites. An example of a query for predicting regulatory elements supported by GALA is "For all pituitary genes expressed in pancreatic islet, find all regions that contain conserved binding sites for CREB."
Data are collected from multiple sources such as NCBI, University of California at Santa Cruz Genome Browser, Ensembl, Rat Genome Database(MCW), Mouse Genome Database(JAX), Gene Expression Atlas(GNF). Much of the data on alignments and their analysis are generated locally or in collaborating with UCSC.
A history page keeps track of previous queries from which a new query can be constructed. Output from GALA can be viewed in the UCSC Genome Browser or on interactive alignment viewer, or as text.
Rat GALA and example queries can be accessed via http://globin.cse.psu.edu.