Chipping Away at Transcription

Researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology used a computational approach to infer a transcriptional regulatory network in macrophage activation, identifying a possible new regulator in TGIF1. Their work was published recently in PLoS Computational Biology. They used sequencing, gene expression microarrays, and transcription factor binding site motif scanning to infer associations, and then followed up their predictions with ChIP-chip studies. "Microarray-based transcriptional profiling has proved useful for mapping such transcriptional programs in simpler model organisms; however, mammalian systems present difficulties such as post-translational regulation of transcription factors, combinatorial gene regulation, and a paucity of available gene-knockout expression data," they write.