At the beginning of the year the faculty received a small pot of funding via the Research England enhancing research culture scheme. We wanted to focus on grass-roots research culture projects at faculty and school level and were pleased to make 14 awards.
One of these was to fund an open research initiative by Dr Rosanna Smith, a computational biologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Cancer Immunology, to improve data accessibility for researchers using gene expression data resources. These data were openly available on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) but typically required coding skills, making them difficult for non-computational biologists to access.
Building a data exploration web tool
Rosanna used the faculty research culture funding to create an interdisciplinary UoS internship, and appointed Computer Sciences student Precious Durojaiye to design and construct a data exploration web tool.
Precious went on to create TCGA Pan-Cancer paired gene expression tool - an interactive, data visualisation tool that enables researchers to compare gene expression between tumour and normal tissue samples from the same patient.
Reflecting on her time as an intern, Precious said that it had given her the opportunity to learn new skills, such as using R for the first time, and had strengthened her interest in working with health data.
A more open TCGA
Precious' tool has greatly improved the accessibility of the data in the TCGA. Researchers no longer needing to know how to code to compare the gene expression of their tissue samples to the database will greatly open the scope of who can benefit from this valuable resource. Rosanna is excited by the possibilities that this will opens up for future researchers.
This open access web tool means that any interested researcher can now visualise the data without needing to code. This extends the utility of a public data resource, benefitting researchers at Southampton and beyond.