Figure 5.

Tissue-based expression of asthma-relevant genes identified by (A) GWAS retrieved from GWAS-catalog (European Bioinformatics Institute) and by (B) literature mining identified by using Literature Lab (Accumenta, USA). The results showed that asthma-relevant genes can be clustered by their expression in target cells/ tissues. Macrophage samples are closely associated with induced sputum samples, whereas CD4+ and CD8+ lymphocyte samples cluster with peripheral blood samples in both (A) and (B) samples. Bronchial biopsy samples cluster together. The tissue-based clustering of asthma-relevant genes has been very clearly demonstrated in case of genes identified by literature-mining (B). A gene-level circular heatmap demonstrating tissue-wise expression of GWAS-identified genes have been shown in panel C.