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My name is Tom Freeman. I'm in the division of genetics and genomics at the Roslin Institute.
What I am going to show you today is essentially a programme we have been working on now for
the last five years which allows us to essentially visualise data as networks.
So what you are seeing here is essentially a large amount of data which is derived from
a genomics platform called 'microarrays' and these microarrays allow us to measure the
level of activity of every gene in the human body or mouse or whatever the ray is designed
for. In this world then what we have done, in this data here is our attempt to begin
to understand how genes are used across a whole range of different populations of mouse
cells which are derived from the immune system. So these graphs here are essentially a display
of a large amount of data. In each case here, each one of these nodes as they are called,
or as we say 'spheres', represents a gene and those genes are connected to other genes
by something called an edge. The edge in this case relates to how similar that gene is expressed
to that gene so that we can begin to see quite complex relationships such as here, where
all of these genes essentially in this purple cluster here are genes which have a very similar
expression pattern so there are lots of edges between them.
If I wanted to look at some of these genes then I can pull up the second tool within
this and this allows me to display a given group of genes.
Lets just click on one at random here. And what you can see is that there is a whole
bunch of genes across 300 samples here which are expressed in this one particular cell
type and this begins to tell something about what those genes might do and if I click on
this side then I can see the type of genes these are and this shows the profile of how
they are expressed. Likewise I can move through the graph and begin to see different patterns
of expression and these different patterns of expression relate to the functional biology
of the genes of interest. What this allows us then to do is have a resource which we
can understand something about gene function and their role of these genes in protecting
animals from disease by understanding how they are regulated, what cells they are expressed
by allows us to begin to unpick some of the complexity which is there in biology and shows
us how they are expressed.