Prioritizing functional modules mediating genetic perturbations and their phenotypic effects: a global strategy

We have developed a global strategy based on the Bayesian network framework to prioritize the functional modules mediating genetic perturbations and their phenotypic effects among a set of overlapping candidate modules. We take lethality in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and human cancer as two examples to show the effectiveness of this approach. We discovered that lethality is more conserved at the module level than at the gene level and we identified several potentially 'new' cancer-related biological processes.