Fig. 5
From: Unity in defence: honeybee workers exhibit conserved molecular responses to diverse pathogens
Methodological workflow of the directed rank product analysis (DiRank). This new method aims to identify genes with similar expression profile to a theoretical or observed profile of another gene. Gene expression values and profiles (geps) (shown in blue) and custom profile (cp) (shown in red), consisting of relative rank values, serve as input (yellow boxes). In rectangular matrices, gene expression values are reported in rows, while columns represent the transcriptome datasets. A custom profile can either be a user-defined profile or an existing gene expression profile. The directed rank product analysis aims to identify genes with a similar expression profile to the custom profile and to assign associated p-values. The custom profile is subtracted from each of the gene expression profiles and each difference (gep - cp) is transformed by 1 -| gep - cp|. Transformed gene expression values and corresponding profiles are shown in green in the grey box. These transformed gene expression values are then used as input data for a rank product analysis. As an example, the transformed gene expression values surrounded by an orange frame are ranked on top by the rank product analysis as the original gene expression profile was the most similar (before transformation) to the custom profile