TY - JOUR AU - Zhou, Linqi AU - Ma, Xiaotu AU - Sun, Fengzhu PY - 2008 DA - 2008/06/26 TI - The effects of protein interactions, gene essentiality and regulatory regions on expression variation JO - BMC Systems Biology SP - 54 VL - 2 IS - 1 AB - Identifying factors affecting gene expression variation is a challenging problem in genetics. Previous studies have shown that the presence of TATA box, the number of cis-regulatory elements, gene essentiality, and protein interactions significantly affect gene expression variation. Nonetheless, the need to obtain a more complete understanding of such factors and how their interactions influence gene expression variation remains a challenge. The growth rates of yeast cells under several DNA-damaging conditions have been studied and a gene's toxicity degree is defined as the number of such conditions that the growth rate of the yeast deletion strain is significantly affected. Since toxicity degree reflects a gene's importance to cell survival under DNA-damaging conditions, we expect that it is negatively associated with gene expression variation. Mutations in both cis-regulatory elements and transcription factors (TF) regulating a gene affect the gene's expression and thus we study the relationship between gene expression variation and the number of TFs regulating a gene. Most importantly we study how these factors interact with each other influencing gene expression variation. SN - 1752-0509 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/1752-0509-2-54 DO - 10.1186/1752-0509-2-54 ID - Zhou2008 ER -