Sequence based gene expression analysis

Abstract

Life sciences in the twentieth century made major strides in unraveling several basic biological phenomena applicable to all living systems such as deciphering the genetic code and defining the central dogma (replication, transcription and translation), through observation and simple experimentation. However, biological research in the twenty-first century is primarily driven by high precision instrumentation for exploring the complexity of biological systems in greater detail. Very large datasets are generated from these instruments that require efficient computational tools for data mining and analysis. The definition of the term "high-throughput" has had to be redefined at regular intervals because of the exponential growth in the volume of data generated with each technological advance. For addressing the needs of modeling, simulation and visualization of large and diverse biological datasets from sequence, gene expression and proteomics datasets, "systems biology" (Hood 2003) approaches are being developed for construction of gene regulatory networks (Dojer et al. 2006; Imoto et al. 2002; Xiong 2006; Xiong et al. 2004) and for identification of key control nodes. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009. All rights reserved.