Perspective abstract


Nature Chemical Biology 4, 658 - 664 (2008)
Published online: 20 October 2008 | doi:10.1038/nchembio.122

Learning biological networks: from modules to dynamics

Richard Bonneau1


Learning regulatory networks from genomics data is an important problem with applications spanning all of biology and biomedicine. Functional genomics projects offer a cost-effective means of greatly expanding the completeness of our regulatory models, and for some prokaryotic organisms they offer a means of learning accurate models that incorporate the majority of the genome. There are, however, several reasons to believe that regulatory network inference is beyond our current reach, such as (i) the combinatorics of the problem, (ii) factors we can't (or don't often) collect genome-wide measurements for and (iii) dynamics that elude cost-effective experimental designs. Recent works have demonstrated the ability to reconstruct large fractions of prokaryotic regulatory networks from compendiums of genomics data; they have also demonstrated that these global regulatory models can be used to predict the dynamics of the transcriptome. We review an overall strategy for the reconstruction of global networks based on these results in microbial systems.

Top
  1. Richard Bonneau is in the Biology and Courant Computer Science Department, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, 1009 Silver Center, New York, New York 10003-6688, USA. e-mail: bonneau@nyu.edu


MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS

These links to content published by NPG are automatically generated.

NEWS AND VIEWS

Size matters: network inference tackles the genome scale

Molecular Systems Biology News and Views (13 Feb 2007)

Functional Annotation: Extracting functional and regulatory order from microarrays

Molecular Systems Biology News and Views (25 May 2005)


Extra navigation

Subscribe to Nature Chemical Biology

Subscribe

Search PubMed for

Open Innovation Challenges

  • Single-cell Analysis Platform

    • Deadline: Dec 02 2009
    • Reward: $5,000 USD

    This Challenge is looking for novel approaches to analyzing changes at a single-cell level. This is...

  • Optimizing Sub-cellular Localization Tags

    • Deadline: Nov 29 2009
    • Reward: $20,000 USD

    The Seeker is looking for methods to optimize sub-cellular localization tags for protein expression....

naturejobs