You will need to prepare a file of gene expression values from some experiment such as an RNA-Seq or microarray.
The
file should have at least one column of unique IDs for genes/probes and multiple columns for data. The first row
should have headers denoting the contents of the column, the headers don't have to follow any particular convention.
E.G
The column `gene_id` contains unique IDs, `tracking_id` is a second alternative naming scheme and the rest are data columns. The header indicates a unique treatment/sample name for the column.
The file must be saved as a `.csv` (comma separated value) file, which you can create in Excel. This means you mustn't use commas in your data file, anywhere!
Yes. But don't use commas. Also try just to use numbers, letters of the alphabet and the underscore (`_`) character in names, to make it as readable by any program as possible.
You can specify a missing data point in a column by using `NA` in the cell in place of the number.
You can also tell PINet to ignore columns of data in the interface by selecting the column as `UNUSED`.