Abstract
Elucidation of gene regulatory networks is the key to understanding the complex interplay of transcription factors (TFs) in the growth and propagation of organisms. In this work, we applied the theory that genes belonging to the same pathway are co-expressed, and therefore a promoter analysis of Arabidopsis genes could predict the transcriptional relationships between metabolic pathway genes. Using this approach, a total of 2268 TF-gene pairs were analyzed, 91 of which were characterized as highly confident, and 4 were confirmed by previously published experimental data. These results suggest that the predictions by this model are reliable. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the use of metabolic pathways to interpret gene regulatory networks of Arabidopsis has the potential to improve our understanding of the role of these processes in plant development and to identify biological functions of unknown genes.
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This work was supported by the Science Foundation of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 07ZZ60).
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Jiao, Q., Yang, Z. & Huang, J. Construction of a gene regulatory network for Arabidopsis based on metabolic pathway data. Chin. Sci. Bull. 55, 158–162 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-009-0728-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-009-0728-8