UC Santa Cruz

Analysis of gene transcriptome data plays a crucial role in understanding key biological processes that govern wound healing. Oral mucosal wounds are found to heal much faster than skin wounds. With the aim of improving rates of wound closure in skin tissues, a comparative study of the two tissues in different wound healing stages is undertaken. Gene transcriptome data of skin and tongue tissues in mus musculus is used to develop a general framework for analyzing gene microarray data and extract meaningful observations. The author presents a new approach to clustering gene time-series dynamics, taking the underlying biological processes into consideration. Furthermore, an analysis on the comparison of skin and tongue tissues’ healing is presented, highlighting processes that are unique to the two tissues based solely on clustering gene microarray expression data.