APPROXIMATE BAYESIAN APPROACHES FOR REVERSE ENGINEERING BIOLOGICAL NETWORKS

Abstract

Genes are known to interact with one another through proteins by regulating the rate at which gene transcription takes place. As such, identifying these gene-to-gene interactions is essential to improving our knowledge of how complex biological systems work. In recent years, a growing body of work has focused on methods for reverse-engineering these so-called gene regulatory networks from time-course gene expression data. However, reconstruction of these networks is often complicated by the large number of genes potentially involved in a given network and the limited number of time points and biological replicates typically measured. Bayesian methods are particularly well-suited for dealing with problems of this nature, as they provide a systematic way to deal with different sources of variation and allow for a measure of uncertainty in parameter estimates through posterior distributions, rather than point estimates. Our current work examines the application of approximate Bayesian methodology for the purpose of reverse engineering regulatory networks from time-course gene expression data. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed approximate Bayesian approaches by comparing their performance on a well-characterized pathway in Escherichia coli.