A novel statistical approach to identify co-regulatory gene modules

ChlP-chip experiments are performed to determine binding sites for transcription factors (TFs). Conventional TF-gene regulation is generated based on p-value cutoff of the binding sites as well as their distance to nearest genes. Taking into account that binding sites of one ChlP-chip experiment should follow the same specific location distribution, we proposed a statistical model using both location and significance information to weigh target genes. With multiple ChlP-chip experiments and gene expression data, we identified co-regulatory and differentially expressed gene modules with a joint clustering and Metropolis sampling approach. We demonstrated the efficiency of our method on a ChlP-chip data set with 38 breast cancer related TFs.