RefEx (Reference Expression dataset; http://refex.dbcls.jp ) provides suitable datasets as a reference for gene expression data of normal human, mouse, and rat tissues and cells. Four different measurement strategies are used in our collected gene expression data. These are: expressed sequence tag (EST), Affymetrix GeneChip, cap analysis of gene expression (CAGE), and transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq).
RefEx is freely available, not only for academic users, but also for for-profit users under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.1 Japan License. Under this unforced license, some users might prefer to download the data and analyze them locally with other softwares. To accomplish this, a user can download a concatenated version of all the data, including sequences, functional annotation of cDNA clones, and log-transformed ratios of gene expression in tab-delimited text format.