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art: revealing

In Silico Flurries: Computing a world of snow. Scientific American. 23 December 2017

data visualization + art

The BC Cancer Agency’s Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG) is a clinical research initiative applying genomic sequencing to the diagnosis and treatment of patients with incurable cancers.

Art of the Personalized Oncogenomics Program

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
— Richard Feynman

Art is Science in Love
— E.F. Weisslitz

what do the circles mean?

The legend can be printed at 4" × 6". The bitmap resolution is 600 dpi.

Quick legend. 5 Years of Personalized Oncogenomics Project at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The poster shows 545 cancer cases. (zoom)

a case for a visual case summary

For every case, we sequence the DNA to study the genome structure and the RNA to discover which genes are expressed and to what extent. The analysis is quite complex and brings together many steps: sequence alignment, structural variation detection, expression profiling, pathway analysis and so on. Every case is "summarized" by a lengthy report, such as the one below, which can run to over 40 pages.

A report for a typical POG case is about 40–50 pages.

One of the goals of the 5-year anniversary art was to represent the cases in a way to clearly show their number, classification as well as diversity. There are many metrics that can be used and I decided to choose the case's correlation to other cancer types.

correlation to TCGA cancer database

For every POG case, the gene expression of 1,744 key genes is compared to that of 1,000's of cases in the TCGA database of cancer samples. For a given cancer type in the TCGA database (e.g. BRCA), we visualize the correlations using box plots. The box plot is ideal for showing the distribution of values in a sample.

Every case is compared to a database of 1,000's of cases. Shown here are box plots for the Spearman correlation coefficient between the gene expression of the POG case and cancers of a specific type (e.g. BRCA, LUAD, etc). (zoom)

The 10 largest Spearman correlation coefficients for the case shown above are

$case corr type tissue ----------------------------------------------- POG661 0.436 BRCA Breast POG661 0.371 PRAD Urologic POG661 0.295 OV Gynecologic POG661 0.257 UCEC Gynecologic POG661 0.244 LUAD Thoracic POG661 0.235 CESC_CAD Gynecologic POG661 0.225 MB_Adult Central Nervous System POG661 0.222 KICH Urologic POG661 0.219 THCA Endocrine POG661 0.208 UCS Gynecologic$

In the figure below I show how the final encoding of the correlations is done. First, the top three correlations are taken—using more generates a busy look and diminishes visual impact. The correlations are encoded as concentric rings.

Because in most cases the differences in the top 3 correlations are relatively small, differences are emphasized by non-linearly scaling the encoding (the correlations are first scaled $r^3$).

Case POG661. Median gene expression correlations with different cancer types from TCGA database. (A) Top 10 correlations shown as a bar plot. Color coding is by source tissue associated with the cancer type. (B) Top 10 correlations encoded as concentric rings. The width of the ring is proportional to the correlation. (C) Top 3 correlations. (D) Top 3 correlations scaled with a power to emphasize differences. (zoom)

The type face is Proxima Nova. The colors for each tissue source are

$Gastrointestinal ● 234,62,144 Breast ● 237,75,51 Thoracic ● 242,130,56 Gynecologic ● 253,188,61 Soft tissue ● 244,217,59 Skin ● 193,216,51 Urologic ● 114,197,49 Hematologic ● 29,166,68 Head and neck ● 43,168,224 Endocrine ● 71,82,178 Central nervous system ● 127,65,146 Other ● 150,150,150$
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Optimal experimental design

Tue 31-07-2018
Customize the experiment for the setting instead of adjusting the setting to fit a classical design.

The presence of constraints in experiments, such as sample size restrictions, awkward blocking or disallowed treatment combinations may make using classical designs very difficult or impossible.

Optimal design is a powerful, general purpose alternative for high quality, statistically grounded designs under nonstandard conditions.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Optimal experimental design. (read)

We discuss two types of optimal designs (D-optimal and I-optimal) and show how it can be applied to a scenario with sample size and blocking constraints.

Smucker, B., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2018) Points of significance: Optimal experimental design Nature Methods 15:599–600.

Krzywinski, M., Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Two factor designs. Nature Methods 11:1187–1188.

Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and blocking. Nature Methods 11:699–700.

Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Designing comparative experiments. Nature Methods 11:597–598.

The Whole Earth Cataloguer

Mon 30-07-2018
All the living things.

An illustration of the Tree of Life, showing some of the key branches.

The tree is drawn as a DNA double helix, with bases colored to encode ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms on the tree.

The circle of life. (read, zoom)

All living things on earth descended from a single organism called LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and inherited LUCA’s genetic code for basic biological functions, such as translating DNA and creating proteins. Constant genetic mutations shuffled and altered this inheritance and added new genetic material—a process that created the diversity of life we see today. The “tree of life” organizes all organisms based on the extent of shuffling and alteration between them. The full tree has millions of branches and every living organism has its own place at one of the leaves in the tree. The simplified tree shown here depicts all three kingdoms of life: bacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryota. For some organisms a grey bar shows when they first appeared in the tree in millions of years (Ma). The double helix winding around the tree encodes highly conserved ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms.

Johnson, H.L. (2018) The Whole Earth Cataloguer, Sactown, Jun/Jul, p. 89

Why we can't give up this odd way of typing

Mon 30-07-2018
All fingers report to home row.

An article about keyboard layouts and the history and persistence of QWERTY.

My Carpalx keyboard optimization software is mentioned along with my World's Most Difficult Layout: TNWMLC. True typing hell.

TNWMLC requires seriously flexible digits. It’s 87% more difficult than using a standard Qwerty keyboard, according to Martin Krzywinski, who created it (Credit: Ben Nelms). (read)

McDonald, T. (2018) Why we can't give up this odd way of typing, BBC, 25 May 2018.

Molecular Case Studies Cover

Fri 06-07-2018

The theme of the April issue of Molecular Case Studies is precision oncogenomics. We have three papers in the issue based on work done in our Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG).

The covers of Molecular Case Studies typically show microscopy images, with some shown in a more abstract fashion. There's also the occasional Circos plot.

I've previously taken a more fine-art approach to cover design, such for those of Nature, Genome Research and Trends in Genetics. I've used microscopy images to create a cover for PNAS—the one that made biology look like astrophysics—and thought that this is kind of material I'd start with for the MCS cover.

Cover design for Apr 2018 issue of Molecular Case Studies. (details)

Happy 2018 $\tau$ Day—Art for everyone

Wed 27-06-2018
You know what day it is. (details)

Universe Superclusters and Voids

Mon 25-06-2018

A map of the nearby superclusters and voids in the Unvierse.

By "nearby" I mean within 6,000 million light-years.

The Universe — Superclustesr and Voids. The two supergalactic hemispheres showing Abell clusters, superclusters and voids within a distance of 6,000 million light-years from the Milky Way. (details)