Surfing Gene Networks

Presented by Brett McKinney, University of Tulsa and Laureate Institute for Brain Research

Just as the connectivity of your social network depends on context, such as family, friends, or business relationships, a gene will exhibit differences in network connectivity that depend on contexts such as the environment, the organism or particular phenotype being investigated. Most network approaches define connections based simply on the correlation between genes but neglect context. I will discuss an information-theoretic, context-sensitive approach for inferring gene networks from the most common form of genetic variation, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). I will then discuss our representation of a SNP network as a dynamic probabilistic Markov chain and discuss a random surfer approach to identifying important nodes in the network.