Quantitative characterization of the transcriptional regulatory network in the yeast cell cycle

Genome-wide gene expression programs have been monitored and analyzed in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but how cells regulate global gene expression programs in response to environmental changes is still far from being understood. We present a systematic approach to quantitatively characterize the transcriptional regulatory network of the yeast cell cycle. For the interpretative purpose, 20 target genes were selected because their expression patterns fluctuated in a periodic manner concurrent with the cell cycle and peaked at different phases. In addition to the most significant five possible regulators of each specific target gene, the expression pattern of each target gene affected by synergy of the regulators during the cell cycle was characterized. Our first step includes modeling the dynamics of gene expression and extracting the transcription rate from a time-course microarray data. The second step embraces finding the regulators that possess a high correlation with the transcription rate of the target gene, and quantifying the regulatory abilities of the identified regulators.