Related paper

• "BRANE Clust: Cluster-Assisted Gene Regulatory Network Inference Refinement"
• Aurélie Pirayre, Camille Couprie, Laurent Duval and Jean-Christophe Pesquet
• Accepted in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics , March 2017

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Abstract

Discovering meaningful gene interactions is crucial for the identification of novel regulatory processes in cells. Building accurately the related graphs remains challenging due to the large number of possible solutions from available data. Nonetheless, enforcing a priori on the graph structure, such as modularity, may reduce network indeterminacy issues. BRANE Clust (Biologically-Related A priori Network Enhancement with Clustering) refines gene regulatory network (GRN) inference thanks to cluster information. It works as a post-processing tool for inference methods (i.e. CLR, GENIE3). In BRANE Clust, the clustering is based on the inversion of systems of linear equationsa linear system of equations ap involving a graph-Laplacian matrix promoting a modular structure. Our approach is validated on DREAM4 and DREAM5 datasets with objective measures, showing significant comparative improvements. We provide additional insights on the discovery of novel regulatory or co-expressed links in the inferred Escherichia coli network evaluated using the STRING database. The comparative pertinence of clustering is discussed computationally (SIMoNe, WGCNA, X-means) and biologically (RegulonDB).

Keywords

Gene expression data, Network Inference, Reverse engineering, Alternating optimization, Graph-Laplacian, Random walker, DREAM challenge