Venus (female) and Mars (male) symbols in R plot – using Unicode

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When analyzing a data constructed of individuals (or samples from individuals) of both male and female of a species (e.g. humans), often it is a good idea to compare the distribution of the various studied parameters for the males to those for the females. As for instance in RNAseq analysis, it is the measured expression of many genes may differ significantly between the studied males and females. In other words the gender may exhibit ‘batch effect’ in the gene expression data. Here is one way to use the neat Venus and Mars signs in an R-plot to label the data related to the females and males. Note that the male and the female signs were just randomly assigned here so no gender batch effect is noticeable in this figure.

#Generate normally distributed random variables
# and organize them in a 50*2 matrix
randM<-matrix(rnorm(100, 500, 50), ncol = 2)

#Output plot into png
png(“MaleFemale.png”, res=350, width=2000, height=2000)

#Randomly generate 50 MALE or FEMALE signs
gender<- sample(c("M","F"), 50, replace=T)

#Define suitable pch vector based on Unicodes of
#Venus (Female) and Mars (Mars)
pchVec<-rep(-0x2642L, nrow(randM))
pchVec[gender==”F”]<- -0x2640L

# Rndomly assign colors to define 3 subgroups within
#the 50 individuals
colors<- rainbow(3)
colVec<-sample(colors, 50, replace=T)

plot(randM, pch=pchVec, cex=2, col=colVec, xlab=”X”, ylab=”Y”)
legend(“topleft”, legend=c(“group1″,”group2″,”group3”),
       fill =colors)
dev.off()

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