"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
Currently, one of the most important research problems encountered in molecular biology, bioinformatics, and systems biology consists in deciphering the mechanisms that lie at the basis of gene regulatory networks. The importance of gene regulatory networks is due to their fundamental role in the control and operation of the processes taking place in the living cell. Learning the structure and operation of gene regulatory networks facilitates the identification and understanding of the functions of macromolecules in cells, finding out the biological mechanisms of diseases and organ development, and developing efficient disease diagnosis and therapeutics means. The aim of this project is to build a computationally efficient signal processing framework for global understanding of the structure and functionality of gene regulatory networks.
Two major research thrusts are addressed in this project. The first research thrust develops information theoretic tools for efficient inference of causal regulations between gene expressions, and determination of global topologies for gene regulatory networks. The second research thrust develops a Bayesian information theoretic framework for inference of gene regulatory networks based on the integration of a multitude of heterogeneous data sources. A variational Bayes sampling formalism is also built to overcome the intractable computational complexity and convergence issues associated with the family of Monte-Carlo techniques. This project brings important scientific, technological and educational contributions. By combining microarray data with prior biological knowledge and other data sources, the proposed computational tools have the potential of uncovering new aspects of the logic that governs the transcriptional control and interactions between genes, proteins and other macromolecules.
