Correspondence Analysis Applied to Large Scale Evo-Devo Data

Correspondence analysis (CA) is an exploratory method used for visualizing and understanding high dimensional data. It is mostly applied to contingency tables. Although the method has been used in various fields for decades, including bioinformatics, to our knowledge it has not yet been applied to the evolutionary analysis of gene expression data during developmental process. In this paper we present the application of the CA method to linking evolutionary age of genes and their developmental expression profiles. As a test dataset, we used evolutionary age of genes obtained by phylostratigraphic approach and expression data collected during development of a model microorganism. The obtained results show that CA could complement current approaches for coupling evolutionary and developmental information at the molecular level.