The "Community Effect" denotes intra-territorial signaling amongst cells which constitute a particular tissue or embryonic progenitor field. The cells of the territory express the same transcriptional regulatory state, and the intra-territorial signaling is essential to maintenance of this specific regulatory state. The structure of the underlying gene regulatory network (GRN) subcircuitry expl...

The current gene regulatory network (GRN) for the sea urchin embryo pertains to pregastrular specification functions in the endomesodermal territories. Here we extend gene regulatory network analysis to the adjacent oral and aboral ectoderm territories over the same period. A large fraction of the regulatory genes predicted by the sea urchin genome project and shown in ancillary studies to be e...

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) play a central role in systems biology, especially in the study of mammalian organ development. One key question remains largely unanswered: Is it possible to infer mammalian causal GRNs using observable gene co-expression patterns alone? We assembled two mouse GRN datasets (embryonic tooth and heart) and matching microarray gene expression profiles to systematic...

Reconstructing gene regulatory network (GRN) from timeseries expression data has become increasingly popular since time course data contain temporal information about gene regulation. A typical microarray gene expression data contain expressions of thousands of genes but the number of time samples is usually very small. Therefore, inferring a GRN from such a high-dimensional expression data pos...

Mammalian preimplantation embryonic development (PED) is thought to be governed by highly conserved processes. While it had been suggested that some plasticity of conserved signaling networks exists among different mammalian species, it was not known to what extent modulation of the genomes and the regulatory proteins could "rewire" the gene regulatory networks (GRN) that control PED. We theref...

Genetic regulatory networks (GRN) represent complex interactions between genes brought about through proteins that they code for. Quantification of expression levels in GRN either through experiments or theoretical modeling is a challenging task. Recently, microarray experiments have gained importance in evaluating GRN at the genome level. Microarray experiments yield log fold change in mRNA ab...

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are highly dynamic among different tissue types. Identifying tissue-specific gene regulation is critically important to understand gene function in a particular cellular context. Graphical models have been used to estimate GRN from gene expression data to distinguish direct interactions from indirect associations. However, most existing methods estimate GRN for a...

BACKGROUND The developmental gene regulatory network (GRN) that underlies skeletogenesis in sea urchins and other echinoderms is a paradigm of GRN structure, function, and evolution. This transcriptional network is deployed selectively in skeleton-forming primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs) of the early embryo. To advance our understanding of this model developmental GRN, we used genome-wide chroma...

Organisms have a remarkable capacity to respond to environmental change. They can either respond directly, by means of phenotypic plasticity, or they can slowly adapt through evolution. Yet, how phenotypic plasticity links to evolutionary adaptability is largely unknown. Current studies of plasticity tend to adopt a phenomenological reaction norm (RN) approach, which neglects the mechanisms und...

ABSTRACT In mammals, the pre-gastrula proximal epiblast gives rise to primordial germ cells (PGCs) or somatic precursors in response BMP4 and WNT signaling. Entry into germline requires activation of a naïve-like pluripotency gene regulatory network (GRN). Recent work has shown that suppression OTX2 expression by allows develop PGC fate precise temporal window. However, mechanisms which suppres...