Systems Biology Approach to Model the Life Cycle of Trypanosoma cruzi

(a) Sketch illustrating the life cycle of the parasite. (b) Plots illustrating the transcriptional snapshots of the parasite’s four stages. After a dimensional reduction analysis of the microarray dataset, we have found that the four steady states can be represented by 339 variables. Each of these variables (cells in the 19 × 18 array) corresponds to the intra-cluster average of the log-transformed relative expression level of the genes that belong to the corresponding cluster. Since gene assignment to the clusters is the same for all states, the arrays can be directly compared with one another.