VxInsight is a knowledge mining tool developed by

Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force B ...

with the

Institute for Scientific Information The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, ...

. It allows the user to visualize the relationship between groups of objects in large databases as a 3D landscape. In what Hillier et al. call a "pioneering study," VxInsight has been used to analyze

gene expression Gene expression is the process (including its Regulation of gene expression, regulation) by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, proteins or non-coding RNA, ...

(i.e.

microarray A microarray is a multiplex (assay), multiplex lab-on-a-chip. Its purpose is to simultaneously detect the expression of thousands of biological interactions. It is a two-dimensional array on a Substrate (materials science), solid substrate—usu ...

) data across a number of conditions in ''

C. elegans ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' () is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek ''caeno-'' (recent), ''rhabditis'' ( ...

''. Using VxInsight, Kim et al. were able to cluster genes into "mounts" with coherent functions, and were also able to make novel observations, such as the finding that distinct classes of

transposons A transposable element (TE), also transposon, or jumping gene, is a type of mobile genetic element, a nucleic acid sequence in DNA that can change its position within a genome. The discovery of mobile genetic elements earned Barbara McClinto ...

(such as Tc3 and Mariner transposons) appear to be differentially regulated during development.

References

External links

VxInsight - Sandia National Laboratories

(with a number of screenshots)

Database administration tools Sandia National Laboratories {{database-software-stub