Dynamic visualization of coexpression in systems genetics data

Biologists hope to address grand scientific challenges by exploring the abundance of data made available through modern microarray technology and other high-throughput techniques. The impact of this data, however, is limited unless researchers can effectively assimilate such complex information and integrate it into their daily research; interactive visualization tools are called for to support the effort. Specifically, typical studies of gene co-expression require novel visualization tools that enable the dynamic formulation and fine-tuning of hypotheses to aid the process of evaluating sensitivity of key parameters. These tools should allow biologists to develop an intuitive understanding of the structure of biological networks and discover genes residing in critical positions in networks and pathways. By using a graph as a universal representation of correlation in gene expression, our system employs several techniques that when used in an integrated manner provide innovative analytical capabilities. Our tool for interacting with gene co-expression data integrates techniques such as: graph layout, qualitative subgraph extraction through a novel 2D user interface, quantitative subgraph extraction using graph-theoretic algorithms or by compound queries, dynamic level-of-detail abstraction, and template-based fuzzy classification. We demonstrate our system using a real-world workflow from a large-scale, systems genetics study of mammalian gene co-expression.