Multiscale Modeling of Cross-Regulatory Transcript and Protein Influences

With the popularity of high-throughput transcriptomic techniques like RNAseq, models of gene regulatory networks have been important tools for understanding how genes are regulated. These transcriptomic datasets are usually assumed to reflect their associated proteins. This assumption, however, ignores post-transcriptional, translational, and post-translational regulatory mechanisms that regulate protein abundance but not transcript abundance. Here we describe a method to model cross-regulatory influences between the transcripts and proteins of a set of genes using abundance data collected from a series of transgenic experiments. The developed model can capture the effects of regulation that impacts transcription as well as regulatory mechanisms occurring after transcription. This approach uses a sparse maximum likelihood algorithm to determine relationships that influence transcript and protein abundance. An example of how to explore the network topology of this type of model is also presented. This model can be used to predict how the transcript and protein abundances will change in novel transgenic modification strategies.