Our recent collaborative work on integrated modeling of transcription regulation and metabolic regulation has been published in iScience, an open access interdisciplinary journal from Cell Press.

Puhua Niu, Maria J. Soto, Byung-Jun Yoon, Edward R. Dougherty, Francis J. Alexander, Ian Blaby, Xiaoning Qian, “TRIMER: Transcription Regulation Integrated with MEtabolic Regulation,” iScience, doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.103218.

In this work, we have developed a modeling and simulation pipeline enabling the analysis of Transcription Regulation Integrated with MEtabolic Regulation: TRIMER. TRIMER utilizes a Bayesian network (BN) inferred from transcriptome data to model the transcription factor regulatory network (TRN). TRIMER then infers the probabilities of the gene states relevant to the metabolism of interest, and predicts the metabolic fluxes and their changes that result from the deletion of one or more transcription factors. In this study, we demonstrate that TRIMER yields accurate predictions of how the knockout of one or more TFs affect the metabolic outcomes, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches based on both simulated as well as real experimental data from gene knockout experiments.

iScience is a new open-access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. The advances appearing in iScience include both fundamental and applied investigations across this interdisciplinary range of topic areas.