Figure 2

Liquid association. (a) Association between genes X and Y as mediated by gene Z. When gene Z is expressed at the high level (red), a positive correlation between X and Y is observed. The association changes as the expression of Z is lowered. It eventually becomes a negative trend (green). There are two basic ways (shown in panels b and c) to apply the liquid association (LA) scoring system to guide a genome-wide search. (b) When two genes X and Y are given, compute LA score LA(X, Y|Z) for every gene Z first and then output a short list of high score genes Z1, Z2, and so on. (c) When only one gene X is given, compute LA score LA(X, Y|Z) for every pair of genes X,Y first and then output a short list of high score gene pairs Y1,Z1, Y2,Z2, and so on.