Chapter 8 Conducting Research

Coming up with a good research project idea can be an exciting but daunting challenge. We recommend reviewing the available datasets, choosing one to focus on, and trying one of the following approaches.

  • Approach 1. Identify a pathway that you are interested in researching that is highly expressed in a specific gut/brain region using clusterProfiler.

  • Approach 2. Start with a gene, group of genes, or pathway that you find interesting from a previous lab or you hypothesize has an important role (e.g. trypsin genes in the gut).

  • Approach 3. Jump into the literature! Pick a disease your are interested in (e.g. IBD for the gut dataset) and search the literature for human genes that are involved.