Design:

Jack Lovell, MFA Digital Media, Rhode Island School of Design

David Zacher, Rhode Island School of Design

In collaboration with:

Marta Gomez-Chiarri, Professor, Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences, University of Rhode Island

Ian McDowell, Candidate for M.S., Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, University of Rhode Island

On the East Coast of the U.S., oysters are under attack by a deadly pathogen. Scientists at the University of Rhode Island teamed up with an artist and a designer to develop a software tool capable of visualizing their experimental data.

The complete oyster genome is represented as a network. Each node is a gene, and over fifty thousand edges represent the potential relationships between pairs of genes. The software employs a set of thresholds for eliminating edges and isolating structure in a graph. Scientists explore varying configurations of thresholds to search for the gene that makes some oysters resistant to the pathogen while others perish.