Regulatory -omics

Measuring and analyzing gene expression
Changes in gene expression during development or between different environmental conditions can provide important insight into corresponding changes in the biological processes. With current high throughput technologies we can finally measure the expression levels of all genes in a genome at the same time. However, extracting biological knowledge from the measured data is still a major challenge. This challenge has two main components. 1) How do we go from the raw measurement data to meaningful gene expression levels? This at first seems to be largely a technical issue, but actually requires good knowledge of the underlying biology of gene expression and RNA processing. 2) How can we draw biologically useful conclusions from the hundreds if not thousands of genes that typically change their expression between different treatments? Making sense of changes in gene expression requires close collaboration with the biological domain experts, but also new analysis methods and tools to view the expression changes in the context of existing knowledge like metabolic pathways and gene regulatory networks.