Deciphering transcriptional regulations coordinating the response to environmental changes

Abstract

Background: Gene co-expression evidenced as a response to environmental changes has shown that transcriptional activity is coordinated, which pinpoints the role of transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs). Nevertheless, the prediction of TRNs based on the affinity of transcription factors (TFs) with binding sites (BSs) generally produces an over-estimation of the observable TF/BS relations within the network and therefore many of the predicted relations are spurious.