Pathway Enrichment Analysis

Pathway enrichment analysis (PEA) is a statistical approach that takes a list of genes or proteins of interest — typically derived from a differential expression or proteomics experiment — and identifies which pre-defined biological pathways or functional gene sets are represented more often than expected by chance. By mapping individual molecular changes onto curated pathway knowledge bases such as KEGG, Gene Ontology, or Reactome, PEA translates long gene lists into interpretable biological processes, making it a central tool in the post-analysis of high-throughput omics experiments.