Transcription factors (TFs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) are two major types of regulators of gene expression, at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels, respectively. By gathering their gene regulatory relationships, gene regulatory networks (GRNs) could be formed. A network motif is a type of connection pattern among a set of nodes which appears significantly more frequently than in random networks. Investigations of the network motifs often yield biological insights into the nature of the network. The previous study on miRNA–TF regulation networks concentrated on animals, and relied heavily on computational predictions. The authors collected data concerning miRNA regulation and transcriptional regulation relationships in Arabidopsis from publicly available databases, and further incorporated them with the protein–protein interaction data. All the data in the author's collection are supported by experiments. They screened the network motifs, whose size ranges between 1 and 4. The biological implications of the motifs were further analysed, and a flower development related network was constructed as an example. In this example, they illustrated the relevance of the network with the given process, and proposed the association of several genes with flowers by a network cluster identification. In this study, they analysed the properties of the GRN in Arabidopsis, and discussed their biological implications, as well as their potential applications.

Discovering the regulation of cancer-related gene is of great importance in cancer biology. Transcription factors and microRNAs are two kinds of crucial regulators in gene expression, and they compose a combinatorial regulatory network with their target genes. Revealing the structure of this network could improve the authors’ understanding of gene regulation, and further explore the molecular pathway in cancer. In this article, the authors propose a novel approach graphical adaptive lasso (GALASSO) to construct the regulatory network in breast cancer. GALASSO use a Gaussian graphical model with adaptive lasso penalties to integrate the sequence information as well as gene expression profiles. The simulation study and the experimental profiles verify the accuracy of the authors’ approach. The authors further reveal the structure of the regulatory network, and explore the role of feedforward loops in gene regulation. In addition, the authors discuss the combinatorial regulatory effect between transcription factors and microRNAs, and select miR-155 for detailed analysis of microRNA's role in cancer. The proposed GALASSO approach is an efficient method to construct the combinatorial regulatory network. It also provides a new way to integrate different data sources and could find more applications in meta-analysis problem.

It has been proved and widely acknowledged that messenger RNAs can talk to each other by competing for a limited pool of miRNAs. The competing endogenous RNAs are called as ceRNAs. Although some researchers have recently used ceRNAs to do biological function annotations, few of them have investigated the ceRNA network on specific disease systematically. In this work, using both miRNA expression data and mRNA expression data of breast cancer patient as well as the miRNA target relations, the authors proposed a computational method to construct a breast-cancer-specific ceRNA network by checking whether the shared miRNA sponges between the gene pairs are significant. The ceRNA network is shown to be scale-free, thus the topological characters such as hub nodes and communities may provide important clues for the biological mechanism. Through investigation on the communities (the dense clusters) in the network, it was found that they are related to cancer hallmarks. In addition, through function annotation of the hub genes in the network, it was found that they are related to breast cancer. Moreover, classifiers based on the discriminative hubs can significantly distinguish breast cancer patients’ risks of distant metastasis in all the three independent data sets.

The maintenance of the diverse cell types in a multicellular organism is one of the fundamental mysteries of biology. Modelling the dynamic regulatory relationships between the histone modifications and the gene expression across the diverse cell types is essential for the authors to understand the mechanisms of the epigenetic regulation. Here, the authors thoroughly assessed the histone modification enrichment profiles at the promoters and constructed quantitative models between the histone modification abundances and the gene expression in 12 human cell types. The author's results showed that the histone modifications at the promoters exhibited remarkably cell-type-dependent variability in the cell-type-specific (CTS) genes. They demonstrated that the variable profiles of the modifications are highly predictive for the dynamic changes of the gene expression across all the cell types. Their findings revealed the close relationship between the combinatorial patterns of the histone modifications and the CTS gene expression. They anticipate that the findings and the methods they used in this study could provide useful information for the future studies of the regulatory roles of the histone modifications in the CTS genes.

Community detection has been extensively studied in the past decades largely because of the fact that community exists in various networks such as technological, social and biological networks. Most of the available algorithms, however, only focus on the properties of the vertices, ignoring the roles of the edges. To explore the roles of the edges in the networks for community discovery, the authors introduce the novel edge centrality based on its antitriangle property. To investigate how the edge centrality characterises the community structure, they develop an approach based on the edge antitriangle centrality with the isolated vertex handling strategy (EACH) for community detection. EACH first calculates the edge antitriangle centrality scores for all the edges of a given network and removes the edge with the highest score per iteration until the scores of the remaining edges are all zero. Furthermore, EACH is characterised by being free of the parameters and independent of any additional measures to determine the community structure. To demonstrate the effectiveness of EACH, they compare it with the state-of-the art algorithms on both the synthetic networks and the real world networks. The experimental results show that EACH is more accurate and has lower complexity in terms of community discovery and especially it can gain quite inherent and consistent communities with a maximal diameter of four jumps.