create a bar with different colors representing different categorical data

HI,

I have a list of data with cancer (c) and normal samples (n) sorted to certain order. I want to make a figure to show a colored bar, with red representing the position of cancer samples and green for normal samples on that bar, then I will repeat this for multiple lists to generate a bar for each list. Could anyone let me know how to do this?

My lists looks like:

1. c c c c c c n n c n n c n n n

2. c n c c n c c n n c n c c c n

...

Many thanks!

Jie

Answer 1

[Chad Greene]

Run this:

% Your samples: 
S1 = 'c c c c c c n n c n n c n n n'; 
S2 = 'c n c c n c c n n c n c c c n';

% Remove spaces: 
S1(S1==32) = [];
S2(S2==32) = [];

% Concatenate all samples: 
S = double(vertcat(S1,S2));

% Display: 
imagesc(S)

% Change colors: 
colormap([1 0 0;0 1 0])

% Label stuff: 
set(gca,'ytick',1:size(S,1)) 
ylabel('sample number') 
xlabel('position') 
cb = colorbar('southoutside'); 
set(cb,'ytick',[99 110],'yticklabel',{'cancer','normal'})
caxis([94 114])

[Jie zhang]

Excellent! Thanks a lot!