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Nature Reviews Genetics 8, 699–710 (1 September 2007) | doi:10.1038/nrg2144

Integrating physical and genetic maps: from genomes to interaction networks

Andreas Beyer , Sourav Bandyopadhyay & Trey Ideker

Physical and genetic mapping data have become as important to network biology as they once were to the Human Genome Project. Integrating physical and genetic networks currently faces several challenges: increasing the coverage of each type of network; establishing methods to assemble individual interaction measurements into contiguous pathway models; and annotating these pathways with detailed functional information. A particular challenge involves reconciling the wide variety of interaction types that are currently available. For this purpose, recent studies have sought to classify genetic and physical interactions along several complementary dimensions, such as ordered versus unordered, alleviating versus aggravating, and first versus second degree.