BackgroundFunctional profiling methods have been extensively used in the context of high-throughput experiments and, in particular, in microarray data analysis. Such methods use available biological information to define different types of functional gene modules (e.g. gene ontology -GO-, KEGG pathways, etc.) whose representation in a pre-defined list of genes is further studied. In the most popular type of microarray experimental designs (e.g. up- or down-regulated genes, clusters of co-expressing genes, etc.) or in other genomic experiments (e.g. Chip-on-chip, epigenomics, etc.) these lists are composed by genes with a high degree of co-expression. Therefore, an implicit assumption in the application of functional profiling methods within this context is that the genes corresponding to the modules tested are effectively defining sets of co-expressing genes. Nevertheless not all the functional modules are biologically coherent entities in terms of co-expression, which will eventually hinder its detection with conventional methods of functional enrichment.
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