Identification of functional modules based on transcriptional regulation structure

BACKGROUND: Identifying gene functional modules is an important step towards elucidating gene functions at a global scale. Clustering algorithms mostly rely on co-expression of genes, that is group together genes having similar expression profiles. RESULTS: We propose to cluster genes by co-regulation rather than by co-expression. We therefore present an inference algorithm for detecting co-regulated groups from gene expression data and introduce a method to cluster genes given that inferred regulatory structure. Finally, we propose to validate the clustering through a score based on the GO enrichment of the obtained groups of genes. CONCLUSION: We evaluate the methods on the stress response of S. Cerevisiae data and obtain better scores than clustering obtained directly from gene expression.