Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

With the development of high-throughput, next-generation sequencing and other advanced technologies, a large number of gene expression profiles have been produced. Many of these profiles are available from public databases [1-3]. A challenging research problem that has drawn a lot of attention in the past is to infer gene regulatory networks from the expression data. A gene regulatory network is represented by a directed graph, in which nodes represent transcription factors or mRNA with edges showing transcriptional regulatory relationships between two nodes.