Gene Expression vs. Network Attractors

Microarrays, RNA-Seq, and Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) are common tools used to study the regulatory mechanisms mediating the expression of the genes involved in the biological processes of a cell. Whereas microarrays and RNA-Seq provide a snapshot of the average expression of a set of genes of a population of cells, GRNs are used to model the dynamics of the regulatory dependencies among a subset of genes believed to be the main actors in a biological process. In this paper we discuss the possibility of correlating a GRN dynamics with a gene expression profile extracted from one or more wet-lab expression experiments. This is more a position paper to promote discussion than a research paper with final results.

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