Everybody Wants to be a Node!

My apologies for another long stretch of no postings this fall! First, I was helping to teach the Gene Regulatory Networks in Development course at the MBL in Woods Hole, MA during a good portion of October. Then I got very busy taking a class through Coursera for the last one and a half months, and that ate up my evenings. So the blog fell behind. But I'll now be back at it again, and anticipate that my next post will follow up with the second installment of my last post, which is talking about using link groups to visualize the differences in a network under different experimental conditions.

But before that, I have an example of a BioFabric network in action. Last month was Leroy Hood's 75th birthday celebration, held at the Institute for Systems Biology. As part of the celebration, we assembled some visualizations of Lee's "influence network". One of these networks was based on information from a questionnaire that was sent to Lee's colleagues, and was depicted as a 10 foot long BioFabric network posted on the wall. The pictures here, courtesy of ISB Senior Research Scientist Gustavo Glusman, were taken during the set-up for the party:

Photo by Gustavo Glusman

The network had 330 nodes and 1400 edges; there were nodes for people, places, and research interests. Since the node lines for the people Lee knew were organized in chronological order from when they met him, the viewer could easily spot Lee's professional development, his evolving research interests, and his Caltech to UW to ISB path over the last 40+ years. What was interesting is that people would walk up to the giant poster, find their own node line, and trace their finger along their node to see their associations:

Photo by Gustavo Glusman

Which is exactly what I had hoped they would do, and that's why I think that BioFabric not only enables, but actively invites exploration of very large networks. You can start by seeing the whole structure at once, and subsequently drilling down to the smallest detail does not require you to prune away anything before you can clearly see any relationship you want. Just trace across a node to see how it fits into the whole picture. Let your fingers do the walking! (Does anybody under the age of 30 even know what that means anymore?)