VMus3D - A New Gene Expression Visualisation Approach and Application to Striated Muscle

Abstract

Systems Biology and Bioinformatics have emerged as scientific fields as a consequence of our increasing capacity to use systems-wide technologies to understand biology. However, the internal scales of Systems Biology and Bioinformatics are currently unbalanced: informatically obese and biologically anorexic. The scale of information collected in a single experiment is now vast, but very often the use is limited. Producing meaning from this data has not been elevated to the same level as data collection and so by comparison our understanding of biology remains relatively anorexic.

How best to deal with large amounts of gene expression data has been a research topic of nearly two decades. This research has provided improvements to technologies, processing algorithms and the understanding of the translation of genome to transcriptome. However, it remains that the current and interwoven challenges for understanding biology are; (i) to invent technologies that can determine how the genome is used; (ii) to identify and validate biological mechanisms, and; (iii) to provide meaning to data collected in a high-throughput biologically driven experiment. The focus of this thesis is to provide context to data collected from high-throughput gene expression experiments related specifically to striated muscle.