Integration of Known Transcription Factor Binding Site Information and Gene Expression Data to Advance from Co-Expression to Co-Regulation

The common approach to find co-regulated genes is to cluster genes based on gene expression. However, due to the limited information present in any dataset, genes in the same cluster might be co-expressed but not necessarily co-regulated. In this paper, we propose to integrate known transcription factor binding site information and gene expression data into a single clustering scheme. This scheme will find clusters of co-regulated genes that are not only expressed similarly under the measured conditions, but also share a regulatory structure that may explain their common regulation. We demonstrate the utility of this approach on a microarray dataset of yeast grown under different nutrient and oxygen limitations. Our integrated clustering method not only unravels many regulatory modules that are consistent with current biological knowledge, but also provides a more profound understanding of the underlying process. The added value of our approach, compared with the clustering solely based on gene expression, is its ability to uncover clusters of genes that are involved in more specific biological processes and are evidently regulated by a set of transcription factors.