Reconstruction of gene co-expression network from microarray data using local expression patterns

摘要

BackgroundBiological networks connect genes, gene products to one another. A network of co-regulated genes may form gene clusters that can encode proteins and take part in common biological processes. A gene co-expression network describes inter-relationships among genes. Existing techniques generally depend on proximity measures based on global similarity to draw the relationship between genes. It has been observed that expression profiles are sharing local similarity rather than global similarity. We propose an expression pattern based method called >GeCON to extract >Gene >CO-expression >Network from microarray data. Pair-wise supports are computed for each pair of genes based on changing tendencies and regulation patterns of the gene expression. Gene pairs showing negative or positive co-regulation under a given number of conditions are used to construct such gene co-expression network. We construct co-expression network with signed edges to reflect up- and down-regulation between pairs of genes. Most existing techniques do not emphasize computational efficiency. We exploit a fast correlogram matrix based technique for capturing the support of each gene pair to construct the network.