Exploiting biological pathways to infer temporal gene interaction models

An important goal in genomic research is the reconstruction of the complete picture of temporal interactions among all genes, but this inference problem is not tractable because of the large number of genes, the small number of experimental observations for each gene, and the complexity of biological networks. We focus instead on the B cell receptor (BCR) signaling pathway, which narrows the inference problem and provides a clinical application, as B cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL) is believed to be related to BCR response. In this work, we infer population-dependent gene networks of temporal interaction within the BCR signaling pathway. We develop simple statistical models that capture the temporal behavior of differentially expressed genes and then estimate the parameters in an Expectation-Maximization framework, resulting in clusters with a biological interpretation for each subject population. Using the cluster labels to define a small number of modes of interaction and imposing sparsity constraints to effectively limit the number of genes influencing each target gene makes the ill-posed problem of network inference tractable.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Kemper, Corey Ann, 1979-

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• W. Eric L. Grimson and John Fisher.
• .

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38563

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38563