Improving biological significance of gene expression biclusters with key missing genes

Identifying condition-specific co-expressed gene groups is critical for gene functional and regulatory analysis. However, given that genes with critical functions (such as transcription factors) may not co-express with their target genes, it is insufficient to uncover gene functional associations only from gene expression data. In this paper, we propose a novel integrative biclustering approach to build high quality biclusters from gene expression data, and to identify critical missing genes in biclusters based on Gene Ontology as well. Our approach delivers a complete inter-and intra-bicluster functional relationship, thus provides biologists a clear picture for gene functional association study. We experimented with the Yeast cell cycle and Arabidopsis cold-response gene expression datasets. Experimental results show that a clear inter-and intra-bicluster relationship is identified, and the biological significance of the biclusters is considerably improved.