Searching for master regulators of transcription in a human gene expression data set

Microarray technologies allow the measurement of the expression levels of thousands of transcripts at the same time. As part of Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 (GAW15), we analyzed a data set that measured the expression of more than 3000 genes in 14 families. Our goal was to identify genomic regions that regulate the expression of several genes at the same time. We tried two different approaches: one was maximum likelihood-based variance-component linkage analysis and the other was a new linkage regression approach. We detected some loci that were linked with the expression level of more genes than would be expected by chance. These loci are candidates for master regulators of transcription (MRT). Finally, for each candidate MRT, we did a gene ontology (GO) analysis to test whether the genes linked to it were biologically related.