A framework for elucidating regulatory networks based on prior information and expression data.

Elucidating regulatory networks is an intensively studied topic in bioinformatics. Integration of different sources of information could facilitate this task. We propose to incorporate these information sources in the structure prior of a Bayesian network. We are currently investigating two complementary sources of information: PubMed abstracts combined with publicly available taxonomies or ontologies, and known protein-DNA interactions. These priors, either separately or combined, have the potential of reducing the complexity of reverse-engineering regulatory networks while creating more robust and reliable models. Moreover this approach can easily be extended with other data sources. In such a way Bayesian networks provide a powerful framework for data integration and regulatory network modeling.