FLAIR-AD
Where does IRF1 bind in microglia, and what does that mean for Alzheimer's?
- Neuroscience
- Genomics
- Data viz
Mission
Catch the Binder
Find the real IRF1 in a crowd of lookalike proteins. A normal antibody grabs the wrong ones, so you will need a tag.
Best: not set yet
Skip to the write-upEverything in the game is made-up data. Press Escape any time to pause.
Why I made it
FLAIR-AD is the public companion site for the IRF1 project I work on in the Skene Lab, at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College London. The project asks where a transcription factor called IRF1 binds across the states a microglial cell can be in, and how those binding sites connect to Alzheimer's genetic risk.
I wanted people who are not geneticists to follow the story, and I wanted scientists to be able to check the evidence. So the site has two faces: a plain-language page, and a data page with the charts.
How it works
The public page walks through the three microglial states I study (Gardener, Alarmed and disease-associated), why IRF1 is a candidate master regulator, and the antibody problem. Antibodies against transcription factors are often not specific enough, so I tag the protein with FLAG using prime editing and map it with a method that avoids PCR bias.
The data page has an enrichment chart for cell-type specificity of Alzheimer's genetic risk, a Manhattan plot of published GWAS loci, quality-control stats and a volcano plot. It is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with D3 for the charts and GSAP for the scroll animation, and it deploys from GitHub to Netlify.
Where it stands
The site is live and I keep updating it as the project moves through its four aims. The game here is a toy version of the antibody problem, using made-up proteins, not my data.