Gene Expression Networks

With the advent of microarrays and next-generation biotechnologies, the use of gene expression data has become ubiquitous in biological research. One potential drawback of these data is that they are very rich in features or genes though cost considerations allow for the use of only relatively small sample sizes. A useful way of getting at biologically meaningful interpretations of the environmental or toxicological condition of interest would be to make inferences at the level of a priori defined biochemical pathways or networks of interacting genes or proteins that are known to perform certain biological functions. This chapter describes approaches taken in the literature to make such inferences at the biochemical pathway level. In addition this chapter describes approaches to create hypotheses on genes playing important roles in response to a treatment, using organism level gene coexpression or protein–protein interaction networks. Also, approaches to reverse engineer gene networks or methods that seek to identify novel interactions between genes are described. Given the relatively small sample numbers typically available, these reverse engineering approaches are generally useful in inferring interactions only among a relatively small or an order 10 number of genes. Finally, given the vast amounts of publicly available gene expression data from different sources, this chapter summarizes the important sources of these data and characteristics of these sources or databases. In line with the overall aims of this book of providing practical knowledge to a researcher interested in analyzing gene expression data from a network perspective, the chapter provides convenient publicly accessible tools for performing analyses described, and in addition describe three motivating examples taken from the published literature that illustrate some of the relevant analyses.