CLARITY: A Common Lisp Data Alignment Repository
CLARITY is a tool and method for the storage and comparison of data with numeric and set membership components. It is specifically geared toward timecourse microarray data, which is used to study the activity of genes across time. By using data that has been redescribed into Gene Ontology (GO) terms, and summarizing the regulation of these terms across time using characters (together forming sequences) we are able to use standard DNA alignment techniques with these sequences. Due to the prevalence and size of microarray experiments, finding a way to analyze new experiments as well as consider their relation to prior work is a significant contribution. CLARITY aims to help researchers update their prior findings as new data becomes available, and to automate this process. Contained in the software is a novel method of comparison, based on Gantt charts, which allows us to reason about numerical data in a way that we do DNA sequences. I.e. Rather than just looking at the numbers describing one gene across time as compared to another, we can consider insertions, deletions, mutations in these sequences of numbers. This is done efficiently using a global alignment with an affine (linear) gap score, a variant of the Needleman-Wunsch and Smith-Waterman algorithms
The Gene Ontology (GO), is a controlled vocabulary used to aid the description of genes and gene product attributes in a variety of organisms. There are three different ontologies that describe molecular functions, biological processes, and cellular components.
Features
CLARITY provides novel methods for computing and visualizing the relationship among large amounts of data. The graphical interface allows the user to browse the database contents in text form as well as see the data arranged into a phylogenetic tree. There is more information on this interface here
The CLARITY Dictionary
The CLARITY
dictionary contains all the definitions comprising the library.
Acknowledgments
This project was sponsored by the Google Summer of Code program. The Lisp NYC group provided moral guidance and support. The NYU Courant Bioinformatics Group provided all the rest.
Site Map
None yet.
Questions? Queries? Suggestions? Comments? Please direct them at me.
News
News in chronological order, most recent on top.
- 2006-06-9
Started the site.