ABSTRACT
Our ability to interrogate the cell and computationally assimilate its answers is improving at a dramatic pace. The transformation of biology into a data-driven science is hence continuing unabated, as we become engulfed in ever-larger quantities of information about genes, proteins, pathways, and even entire processes. For instance, the study of even a focused aspect of cellular activity, such as gene action, now benefits from multiple high-throughput data acquisition technologies such as microarrays [4], genome-wide deletion screens [7], and RNAi assays [14-16]. Consequently, analysis and mining techniques, especially those that provide data reduction down to manageable quantities, have become a mainstay of computational biology and bioinformatics. From simple clustering of gene expression profiles [10], researchers have begun
T&F Cat # C6847 Chapter: 22 page: 561 date: August 5, 2009
T&F Cat # C6847 Chapter: 22 page: 562 date: August 5, 2009
uncovering networks of concerted (regulatory) activity [20,26], reconstructing the dynamics of cellular processes [9,23], and even generating system-wide perspectives on complex diseases such as cancer [25].
