Pathways in Reactome are curated in a generic cell and are agnostic to tissue types. However, different cell types have different functional requirements and consequently the underlying pathway activities also vary. Studying pathways in a tissue-specific manner will help to understand the biology in context.

Reactome now boasts a tool that can categorize pathways into different tissue types based on protein expression. We overlay tissue-specific protein expression data from the ExpressionAtlas database on empirically validated pathway information in Reactome. This facilitates the sorting of pathways from a generic cell to different tissue-types. This new feature allows users to select an experiment and analyse Reactome pathways in different tissues.

To try it out, select the "Tissue Distribution" tab, choose the tissues of your interest and click the "Go" button. The results are overlaid in the pathways overview and pathway diagrams similar to other analysis types. Users can cycle through the selected tissues via the small control panel displayed at the bottom of the viewport.