Bioinformatics Pipeline for Gene Regulatory Network Discovery: A Case Study with Exercise Response

Gene regulatory networks are at the core of many biological processes, dictating how a wide range of genes, and their products, interact with one another. Gaining further understanding on how these networks are structured and how they function within the body can aid in deriving meaningful insights on the body’s inner-workings when exposed to any number of conditions. Unfortunately, the information gathered within some studies may be lacking in, for example, sample size or measurements taken at multiple time-points. This work addresses these issues and outlines a pipeline which navigates these smaller collections of data in order to still extract meaningful insights – particularly on gene regulatory networks for a dataset involving various exercise interventions. The work described below demonstrates how a number of statistical techniques, tools, and literature review can yield numerous findings to include: genes relevant to exercise, the relationships between those genes and how they vary across the exercise interventions, and the longevity of these gene regulatory networks.