Figure 1
Study flow for the identification and validation of transcription factor (TF) regulators of a gene expression-based biomarker of asthma3 using the proposed NeTFactor framework. Box 1 denotes the first step of NeTFactor, namely the inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from the datasets that yielded the original biomarker. Box 2 represents steps 2–4 of NeTFactor which identify the most significant set of likely TF regulators, which are themselves active in the disease and regulate a significant fraction of genes constituting the biomarker. Box 3 depicts siRNA-mediated knock-down experiments in an airway epithelial cell line model employed to experimentally validate the identified regulators.
