Question: Hello! How does the wiring diagram work? (It looks very confusing) :)

Ian Simpson answered on 22 Jun 2014:

It is and any help you can give would be much appreciated 😀

The fact is that the big “fur-ball” as we often call it is the starting point for our analysis and we spend most of our time trying to rearrange and perform calculations on it to allow us to make it much simpler to understand.

One of the first things we do is perform a technique called “clustering” in which we group together any genes/proteins that look like they belong together. We can chose which properties we might use to make that decision. This is often to do with the structure of the network itself, but could be related to how confident we were that the connection was real or how similar the gene/protein expression is between points (called nodes) in the network.

Next we would often try to assign some possible functions to those groups, so for example one group may be involved in a particular signalling pathway or another involved in controlling cell division. We also try to calculate if any genes/proteins look particularly important. If they do they become even more interesting to us and we can then often extract a sub-network from the big one and work on that in more detail.