Ge and second author Zhihua Liu were partners in genetics professor George Church's annual course, Genomics and Computational Biology. As part of that course, students must pick an individual project and run with it, says Church. "If the projects are good enough, then I continue to encourage them and help them take it to the next step." Ge and Liu's project was to correlate expression-profiling (transcriptome) data with protein-protein interaction (interactome) data. What they found was that these data sets overlap, providing a way to add confidence to studies that would emanate from such results.
This project stems from the ever-increasing gap between available sequence data and available functional data. Some researchers now rely heavily on high-throughput methods, such as DNA microarray analysis, to illuminate new and interesting genes. Because of the vast quantity of data such techniques produce, the data is often clustered, in which data analyses group genes ...
