Abstract |
In the last years biologists' attention has been drawn in a new area which explores the behavior of genes. Key elements in this area are microRNAs, short (~22 nucleotide) RNA genes. The important property of microRNAs is their ability to regulate other genes. Apart from this, microRNAs are also included as parts of other genes. These two types of relations between microRNAS and other genes form a network which is called "microRNA regulatory network". Unfortunately, the experimental verification of such regulations is a hard, time-consuming and expensive task. Therefore, attention has been shifted to algorithms for the prediction of such regulations. Since efforts are focused on the development of predictions, not enough attention has been paid to the structure and other properties of these networks. We attempt to fill this gap with an application for the interactive visualization of microRNA regulatory networks. Furthermore, knowledge about genes' functional annotation is stored and organized in the Gene Ontology (G.O.). We propose an alternative way of looking at microRNA regulatory networks, through the G.O. To support this, we also propose an algorithm for the visualization of the G.O. In our application a browser for the G.O. is also included and we offer the ability to analyze these two objects concurrently. This work provides interactive algorithms for the visualization of microRNA regulatory networks and proposes a different point of view for them, through the Gene Ontology.
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