Genome-infographics: making sense of what we do

We recently had out Institute symposium; lots of talks about the science going on in the building, mostly unpublished work and most of it very exciting. I am always amazed at how lucky I am to be working in a place that uses genomics so widely, this year we had talks from many of out non-genomics groups that still included some work performed in my lab. Genomics is getting (almost) everywhere!

For the poster session this year I wanted to use infographics to create some nice visualisations of what we've done over the past seven years. I thought I'd share these and point you to the resources I used to create them.


Infogram for infographics: Most of the charts below were created on the infogam website. They allow you to upload data in a simple tabular form and make many different types of graphical representation easy to implement. I'd certainly recommend you take a look. You can see my infographic on research spending by country for instance.
Find out more at the Infogram blog.

Which technologies do we use in my lab: This chart shows the different technologies we've run and the size of the block indicates usage, e.g. we ran over 6000 arrays and about 3000 ChIP-seq samples. I like the expanded view this chart uses to highlight things slightly differently to a normal pie chart.

What sort of cancers do we work on: This chart uses silhouettes of people in different colours to show the variety of cancers we work on and the relative numbers. We've done a lot of Breast and Ovarian work; the Caldas and Brenton research groups have published some great papers in Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM, STM and others.

Who's done the most work: In this chart I wanted to show which groups were our biggest users by spend. There is often an imbalance in a core facility, with a few groups dominating. At our institute this balances out nicely across the different cores we have. Some groups do lots of Genomics; guess which ones!

Sequencing growth rates: This is not from Infogram but created by me. You can see (hopefully) how our NGS output grew from 2009 (inside) through 2012 (outside), the colouring is the same as the chart above. Nearly 25Tb this year so far and with 1Tb runs coming the volumes are still rapidly growing.

Sequencer graphics: If anyone wants I am happy to share these graphics I made for each of the Illumina sequencers. I doubt you'll want to GAIIx any more though! They are PowerPoint images and I can save them as something more convenient and put on dropbox, let me know.