Subway Plot for Immune Cell Relationships 2020

Designers: Michael Stadnisky, Science + Design, Phitonex, Inc., Durham, North Carolina, USA
Client: Phitonex, Inc., Durham, North Carolina, USA

The entire field of biology has been wrestling with a thorny information design problem for many years – all biologists have to communicate and consume information about relationships. These relationships are of different types — cellular communication networks, gene networks, development (or evolution) lineages, or component identity. We have recently designed a biological “subway plot” as a way to communicate cellular identity relationships and have shared our template freely with the life science research community.  We designed this as part of our work which pushed the envelope in immune system research in which we showed we were able to ask 40 simultaneous questions per single cell. This enables broader and deeper immune cell profiling than ever before.  

We wanted to make this work understandable to a wide audience, leading us the design a new information design for communicating.