Modified Half-System Based Method for Reverse Engineering of Gene Regulatory Networks.

Abstract

The accurate reconstruction of gene regulatory networks for proper understanding of the intricacies of complex biological mechanisms still provides motivation for researchers. Due to accessibility of various gene expression data, we can now attempt to computationally infer genetic interactions. Among the established network inference techniques, S-system is preferred because of its efficiency in replicating biological systems though it is computationally more expensive. This provides motivation for us to develop a similar system with lesser computational load. In this work, we have proposed a novel methodology for reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks based on a new technique: half-system. Half-systems use half the number of parameters compared to S-systems and thus significantly reduce the computational complexity. We have implemented our proposed technique for reconstructing four benchmark networks from their corresponding temporal expression profiles: an 8-gene, a 10-gene, and two 20-gene networks. Being a new technique, to the best of our knowledge, there are no comparable results for this in the contemporary literature. Therefore, we have compared our results with those obtained from the contemporary literature using other methodologies, including the state-of-the-art method, GENIE3. The results obtained in this work stack favourably against the competition, even showing quantifiable improvements in some cases.