January 12, 2018
Gene regulatory networks are powerful abstractions of biological systems. Since the advent of high-throughput measurement technologies in biology in the late 90s, reconstructing the structure of such networks has been a central computational problem in systems biology. While the problem is certainly not solved in its entirety, considerable progress has been made in the last two decades, with mature tools now available. This chapter aims to provide an introduction to the basic concepts underpinning network inference tools, attempting a categorisation which highlights commonalities and relative strengths. While the chapter is meant to be self-contained, the material presented should provide a useful background to the later, more specialised chapters of this book.
Similar papers 1
October 16, 2022
Inference of gene regulatory networks has been an active area of research for around 20 years, leading to the development of sophisticated inference algorithms based on a variety of assumptions and approaches. With the always increasing demand for more accurate and powerful models, the inference problem remains of broad scientific interest. The abstract representation of biological systems through gene regulatory networks represents a powerful method to study such systems, en...
July 27, 2021
In this paper, we conduct theoretical analyses on inferring the structure of gene regulatory networks. Depending on the experimental method and data type, the inference problem is classified into 20 different scenarios. For each scenario, we discuss the problem that with enough data, under what assumptions, what can be inferred about the structure. For scenarios that have been covered in the literature, we provide a brief review. For scenarios that have not been covered in li...
December 12, 2023
Transcriptomic data is a treasure-trove in modern molecular biology, as it offers a comprehensive viewpoint into the intricate nuances of gene expression dynamics underlying biological systems. This genetic information must be utilised to infer biomolecular interaction networks that can provide insights into the complex regulatory mechanisms underpinning the dynamic cellular processes. Gene regulatory networks and protein-protein interaction networks are two major classes of ...
May 3, 2018
Modelling gene regulatory networks not only requires a thorough understanding of the biological system depicted but also the ability to accurately represent this system from a mathematical perspective. Throughout this chapter, we aim to familiarise the reader with the biological processes and molecular factors at play in the process of gene expression regulation.We first describe the different interactions controlling each step of the expression process, from transcription to...
November 11, 2019
One of the most interesting, difficult, and potentially useful topics in computational biology is the inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from expression data. Although researchers have been working on this topic for more than a decade and much progress has been made, it remains an unsolved problem and even the most sophisticated inference algorithms are far from perfect. In this paper, we review the latest developments in network inference, including state-of-the-ar...
October 4, 2016
Networks represent relationships between entities in many complex systems, spanning from online social interactions to biological cell development and brain connectivity. In many cases, relationships between entities are unambiguously known: are two users 'friends' in a social network? Do two researchers collaborate on a published paper? Do two road segments in a transportation system intersect? These are directly observable in the system in question. In most cases, relations...
May 18, 2017
Much of contemporary systems biology owes its success to the abstraction of a network, the idea that diverse kinds of molecular, cellular, and organismal species and interactions can be modeled as relational nodes and edges in a graph of dependencies. Since the advent of high-throughput data acquisition technologies in fields such as genomics, metabolomics, and neuroscience, the automated inference and reconstruction of such interaction networks directly from large sets of ac...
November 3, 2014
Omics technologies enable unbiased investigation of biological systems through massively parallel sequence acquisition or molecular measurements, bringing the life sciences into the era of Big Data. A central challenge posed by such omics datasets is how to transform this data into biological knowledge. For example, how to use this data to answer questions such as: which functional pathways are involved in cell differentiation? Which genes should we target to stop cancer? Net...
January 3, 2023
Biological systems and processes are networks of complex nonlinear regulatory interactions between nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites. A natural way in which to represent these interaction networks is through the use of a graph. In this formulation, each node represents a nucleic acid, protein, or metabolite and edges represent intermolecular interactions (inhibition, regulation, promotion, coexpression, etc.). In this work, a novel algorithm for the discovery of latent...
June 28, 2019
In the past years, many computational methods have been developed to infer the structure of gene regulatory networks from time-series data. However, the applicability and accuracy presumptions of such algorithms remain unclear due to experimental heterogeneity. This paper assesses the performance of recent and successful network inference strategies under a novel, multifactorial evaluation framework in order to highlight pragmatic tradeoffs in experimental design. The effects...