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Biggin, Mark

Publications and source records attributed to Biggin, Mark.

Linking Advanced Visualization and MATLAB for the Analysis of 3D Gene Expression Data

Three-dimensional gene expression PointCloud data generated by the Berkeley Drosophila Transcription Network Project (BDTNP) provides quantitative information about the spatial and temporal expression of genes in early Drosophila embryos at cellular resolution. The BDTNP team visualizes and analyzes Point-Cloud data using the software application PointCloudXplore (PCX). To maximize the impact of novel, complex data sets, such as PointClouds, the data needs to be accessible to biologists and comprehensible to developers of analysis functions. We address this challenge by linking PCX and Matlab via a dedicated interface, thereby providing biologists seamless access to advanced data analysis functions and giving bioinformatics researchers the opportunity to integrate their analysis directly into the visualization application. To demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, we computationally model parts of the expression pattern of the gene even skipped using a genetic algorithm implemented in Matlab and integrated into PCX via our Matlab interface.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Quantitative Visualization of ChIP-chip Data by Using Linked Views

Most analyses of ChIP-chip in vivo DNA binding have focused on qualitative descriptions of whether genomic regions are bound or not. There is increasing evidence, however, that factors bind in a highly overlapping manner to the same genomic regions and that it is quantitative differences in occupancy on these commonly bound regions that are the critical determinants of the different biological specificity of factors. As a result, it is critical to have a tool to facilitate the quantitative visualization of differences between transcription factors and the genomic regions they bind to understand each factor's unique roles in the network. We have developed a framework which combines several visualizations via brushing-and-linking to allow the user to interactively analyze and explore in vivo DNA binding data of multiple transcription factors. We describe these visualization types and also provide a discussion of biological examples in this paper.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗