That’s a fair approach. I considered it, but ultimately felt that making use of the colorspace extremes was a more important priority.
Cutting off lightness extremes comes with a tradeoff—not only you’re abandoning two colors, but also everything else compresses closer together: genes that were somewhat distinguishable by lightness now become indistinguishable. Everything becomes grayer. Given that I already normalized vibrance (so that every hue maxes out at the same perceived vibrance), which cuts off vibrance extremes for colors like red and green, I felt that greying things further is not a way to go.
Plus, I really like how striking the white or black characters look—really makes you interested in what does this gene do.
A hundred+ genes is what you’d learn during your undergrad classes. This is not counting gene category names (we’re expected to know what Hox genes are, but not what each one does individually), and genes not relevant to humans (prokaryotes, viruses...).
Then each time you change a lab, you’re expected to learn:
* Lab’s genes of interest (this time, if you’re in a Hox lab, what each individual Hox does, there’s 39 of them)
* Markers for the cell types and organelles of interest
* Interactions of the lab favorite genes with rare cell signalling genes not covered in the undergrad
* Genes other labs work on, during journal club or conference talks
So I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s closer to a thousand if you never forget anything (I do).