Analyzing gene expression imaging data in developmental biology

This chapter describes the application of data-intensive methods to the automatic identification and annotation of gene expression patterns in the mouse embryo. The first section of the chapter introduces ideas behind modern computational and systems biology, how the explosion of data in the postgenomic world has led to new possibilities and even greater challenges. The second section talks about the particular computational biology problem and describes annotating images of gene expression with the right anatomical terms in depth. An automated solution based on data-intensive methods is discussed the third section. The final section looks ahead to the biological significance and systems biology application of these approaches and also describes a large-scale challenge and possible series of experiments with a novel data-intensive computational architecture.