I'm a bit confused on something my professor told me to do for a presentation. He's away on weekends so I've tried to figure it out but I'm lost. Essentially he said instead of showing the absolute gene expression of my gene of interest across many samples, I should show the relative gene expression levels using a ranked-gene expression method. So I have the expression levels of all genes for all my samples in TPM & FPKM but how do I go about doing a ranked-gene expression analysis. Do I simply order the gene expression values (TPM) in descending order and ascribe a position to my gene in my samples and visualize the position they are in with higher position meaning lower expression? Or would it be relative to the most highly expressed gene by taking the TPM of my gene of interest and dividing it by the most highly expressed gene's TPM?
Any advice would be highly appreciated!
I will give a try to percentile rank.