Highly sensitive inference of time-delayed gene regulation by network deconvolution

摘要

BackgroundGene regulatory network (GRN) is a fundamental topic in systems biology. The dynamics of GRN can shed light on the cellular processes, which facilitates the understanding of the mechanisms of diseases when the processes are dysregulated. Accurate reconstruction of GRN could also provide guidelines for experimental biologists. Therefore, inferring gene regulatory networks from high-throughput gene expression data is a central problem in systems biology. However, due to the inherent complexity of gene regulation, noise in measuring the data and the short length of time-series data, it is very challenging to reconstruct accurate GRNs. On the other hand, a better understanding into gene regulation could help to improve the performance of GRN inference. Time delay is one of the most important characteristics of gene regulation. By incorporating the information of time delays, we can achieve more accurate inference of GRN.