Quantitative Intelligence Lab

KAIST is in Daejeon, the scientific capital of Korea which houses much of the nation’s R&D. The campus is beautiful and very international, with ample housing inside and nearby. Well-trained scientists and their passion are important rate-limiting assets of our society. Given how many important scientific questions there are to ask, reducing failure and ensuring each of you succeeds is important even beyond your personal career. There are a lot of reasons why a research project can fail, and some of them are avoidable. For biological research that focuses on genes, assessing ‘which cell’ and ‘how essential’ is critical. A brilliant hypothesis about a gene’s function can crumble if the gene isn’t expressed in the right tissue or if it’s so vital that any perturbation is lethal. Fortunately, a wealth of publicly available data can help you de-risk your project from the outset. This post will walk you through a powerful trifecta of online resources—GTEx, Allen Brain Atlas, and gnomAD—to constrain your research scope and build a more robust hypothesis. Before you even think about complex experiments, a fundamental question needs an answer: Is your gene of interest expressed in the tissue you plan to study? The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) portal is an invaluable resource for exploring gene expression across a wide array of human tissues. The GTEx project has collected data from a multitude of post-mortem donors, providing a comprehensive look at the normal expression landscape. You can visualize both bulk RNA-sequencing data, which gives an average expression level for a tissue, and single-cell RNA-sequencing data for a more granular view. By starting with GTEx, you can quickly confirm if your gene is present in the right biological context, preventing you from pursuin