Biology and Medicine

Abstract

Integrative Bioinformatics Approaches to Analyze Molecular Events in Pluripotency

Priyanka Narad and Upadhyaya KC

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have the capacity to proliferate almost indefinitely. Analysis of gene expression profiles of hESCs could offer an insight into the crucial genes concerned in maintaining pluripotency and the genes that may be involved in cell differentiation. Combining network and high throughput data enables to understand the role of epigenetic mechanisms, signalling pathways and transcription factors responsible in human pluripotency and screening of putative mechanistic relationships, validation of existing knowledge, yielding hypotheses, and suggestions for new experiments. Decoding the hub of factors and their associated interactions is an important beginning to understand the complexities associated with the hESCs and transfer the knowledge for creation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hIPS). This review is aimed at increasing the elemental information of integrative bioinformatics approaches useful for studying self-renewal and differentiation processes using new holistic data on gene expression and epigenetic marks associated with cell pluripotency. Two basic approaches namely the representation as biological networks and semantic web technology have been described for the management of the ever increasing high throughput data. An integrated approach to disentangle the biological intricacies would be highly beneficial in the field of medical and health sciences