Large-scale gene expression data analysis: a new challenge to computational biologists

Abstract

The use of high-density DNA arrays to monitor gene expression at a genome-wide scale constitutes a fundamental advance in biology. In particular, the expression pattern of all genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae can be interrogated using microarray analysis where cDNAs are hybridized to an array of each of the approximately 6000 genes in the yeast genome. In this survey I review three recent experiments related to transcriptional regulation and discuss the great challenge for computational biologists trying to extract functional information from such large-scale gene expression data.