Systematic gene function prediction from gene expression data by using a fuzzy nearest-cluster method

BACKGROUND: Quantitative simultaneous monitoring of the expression levels of thousands of genes under various experimental conditions is now possible using microarray experiments. However, there are still gaps toward whole-genome functional annotation of genes using the gene expression data. RESULTS: In this paper, we propose a novel technique called Fuzzy Nearest Clusters for genome-wide functional annotation of unclassified genes. The technique consists of two steps: an initial hierarchical clustering step to detect homogeneous co-expressed gene subgroups or clusters in each possibly heterogeneous functional class; followed by a classification step to predict the functional roles of the unclassified genes based on their corresponding similarities to the detected functional clusters. CONCLUSION: Our experimental results with yeast gene expression data showed that the proposed method can accurately predict the genes' functions, even those with multiple functional roles, and the prediction performance is most independent of the underlying heterogeneity of the complex functional classes, as compared to the other conventional gene function prediction approaches.