On the Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Networks from Noisy Expression Profiles

Noise is inevitable in microarray data. The real challenge lies in identifying the biomolecular interactions in spite of the significant noise level present in the expression profiles that current technology offers. In this paper, we study the usefulness of an evolutionary approach in reverse engineering the biomolecular connections in a gene circuit from observed system dynamics that is contaminated with noise. The method uses an Information Criteria based fitness evaluation for selecting models, represented in decoupled S-system formalism, instead of the conventional mean squared error (MSE) based fitness evaluation. The suitability of the method is tested in experiments of reconstructing an artificial network from gene expression profiles with varying noise levels. The proposed fitness function has been found more suitable for identifying correct network topology and for estimating the accurate parameter values compared to the existing one.