Combining RNAi Imaging Data With Genomic Data For Gene Interaction Network Construction

A method for construction of a gene interaction network using gene expression analysis, the method comprising:

• for each pair of genes in a first set of gene expression data, computing a first gene interaction measure between a pair of genes, the computation based upon said gene expression data, and clustering genes from the first set based on the expression data;
• for each pair of genes in a second set of a multi-dimensional image stack, image data from the stack depicting groups of cells or intra-cellular structures associated with a second set of genes, and computing a gene relationship measure based upon said cellular images using morphological similarity measure between corresponding groups of cells;
• constructing an initial graph by combining the first set of gene expression data with image data of the second set with each node in the graph associated with one of the genes belonging to one of the first and second sets and drawing edges between nodes, the edges based on membership of gene clusters or morphological distance for the corresponding gene knockdown image stacks;
• expanding connectivity among the nodes in the graph using network propagation, the expanded connectivity forming a final graph;
• and
• verifying the expanded connectivity by sampling designed biological experiments eliciting the relationships between the corresponding genes as represented by the nodes and edges in the final graph.