'gain clues' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you want to say that someone is trying to obtain information or clues about something. For example: "She is working hard to gain clues about the criminal's identity."
By studying what happens when that gene is missing, researchers gain clues to its function.
By studying cancer, biologists can gain clues about how complex life evolved on Earth, and maybe on other planets too.
Whatever the case, astronomers hope that by learning how midsize black holes form, they can gain clues about the origin of the supermassive black holes, also a mystery.
By studying the biochemistry of these heart cells, the scientists hope to gain clues to how they might respond to various drug candidates.
Using advanced tools at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, Stone has been able to watch these crystals assemble at the atomic level and gain clues to the forces that guide this process.
"In future work, we hope to gain clues as to what makes a religion stand out, e.g., when it comes to providing emotional stability or dealing with personal setbacks," they say.
By sequencing the entire genome of numerous samples of the notorious MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria a drug-resistant strain of staph responsible for thousands of deaths in the United States each year researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom have gained clues as to how the superbug travels both around the globe and in local hospitals.
Using brain scanning techniques, they're gaining clues about why some young people develop mental illnesses.
Now, researchers have gained clues about the creatures' closest evolutionary kin by blasting fossils of one group of the animals with high-energy x-rays, which caused various elements in the fossils to fluoresce.
We hence decided to systematically compare complete periostin sequences and especially their C-terminal region across a range of phylogenetically diverse vertebrates in the hope of gaining clues to the functional role of the C-terminal region.
Understanding the compositional dynamics of genomes and their coding sequences is of great significance in gaining clues into molecular evolution and a large number of publically-available genome sequences have allowed us to quantitatively predict deviations of empirical data from their theoretical counterparts.
