Systematic survey reveals general applicability of "guilt-by-association" within gene coexpression networks

Background: Biological processes are carried out by coordinated modules of interacting molecules. As clustering methods demonstrate that genes with similar expression display increased likelihood of being associated with a common functional module, networks of coexpressed genes provide one framework for assigning gene function. This has informed the guilt-by-association (GBA) heuristic, widely invoked in functional genomics. Yet although the idea of GBA is accepted, the breadth of GBA applicability is uncertain. Results: We developed methods to systematically explore the breadth of GBA across a large and varied corpus of expression data to answer the following question: To what extent is the GBA heuristic broadly applicable to the transcriptome and conversely how broadly is GBA captured by a priori knowledge represented in the Gene Ontology (GO)? Our study provides an investigation of the functional organization of five coexpression networks using data from three mammalian organisms. ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Cecily J. Wolfe, Isaac S. Kohane, Atul J. Butte
• Keywords: BMCBI 2005, Coexpression Networks, Gene Function, Gene Ontology