Fig. 1

Overview of the gene-set distance analysis (GSDA) method. a A color bar of a quantiative phenotype aligned with a heatmap of a gene expression matrix. In both the color bar and heatmap, rows represent variables, colums represent subjects, blue represents low values, and red represents high values. A black box is drawn around the portion of the gene expression heatmap corresponding to a predefined gene-set of scientific interest. The columns are ordered by the phenotype data values. b A heatmap of the phenotype distance matrix with blue indicating short distance and red indicating long distance. c A similarly colored heatmap of the gene-set gene expression distance matrix. d A scatterplot of the gene-set distance and phenotype distance in which each point represents these two distances for one pair of subjects. The GSDA method computes a p value of 0.0274 for the association in this illustrative example. e Illustrates the association with a dendrogram based on gene expression distance, a color bar for the phenotype data, and a heatmap for the expression data of the gene set