Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on May 8, 2008
Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn220
Discerning static and causal interactions in genome-wide reverse engineering problems
aSISSA-ISAS, International School for Advanced Studies, via Beirut 2-4, 34014 Trieste, Italy
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. C. Altafini, E-mail: altafini{at}sissa.it
| Abstract |
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Motivation: In the past years devising methods for discovering gene regulatory mechanisms at a genome-wide level has become a fundamental topic in the field of systems biology. The aim is to infer gene-gene interactions in an increasingly sophisticated and reliable way through the continuous improvement of reverse engineering algorithms exploiting microarray data.
Results: This work is inspired by the several studies suggesting that co-expression is mostly related to "static" stable binding relationships, like belonging to the same protein complex, rather than other types of interactions more of a "causal" and transient nature (e.g. transcription factor–binding site interactions). The aim of this work is to verify if direct or conditional network inference algorithms (e.g. Pearson correlation for the former, partial Pearson correlation for the latter) are indeed useful in discerning static from causal dependencies in artificial and real gene networks (derived from E.coli and S.cerevisiae).
Contact: altafini{at}sissa.it
Associate Editor: Dr. Olga Troyanskaya
Received on January 16, 2008; revised on April 17, 2008; accepted on May 1, 2008