Applications of integrative OMICs approaches to gene regulation studies

Abstract

Background: Functional genomics employs dozens of OMICs technologies to explore the functions of DNA, RNA and protein regulators in gene regulation processes. Despite each of these technologies being powerful tools on their own, like the parable of blind men and an elephant, any one single technology has a limited ability to depict the complex regulatory system. Integrative OMICS approaches have emerged and become an important area in biology and medicine. It provides a precise and effective way to study gene regulations.

Results: This article reviews current popular OMICs technologies, OMICs data integration strategies, and bioinformatics tools used for multi-dimensional data integration. We highlight the advantages of these methods, particularly in elucidating molecular basis of biological regulatory mechanisms.

Conclusions: To better understand the complexity of biological processes, we need powerful bioinformatics tools to integrate these OMICs data. Integrating multi-dimensional OMICs data will generate novel insights into system-level gene regulations and serves as a foundation for further hypothesis-driven research.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

gene regulatory networks / integrative analysis / OMICs / ChIP-seq / RNA-seq

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our work was supported by a Direct Grant for Research from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China (No. 4053150) to JQ, research grants from Research Grants Council, Hong Kong SAR, China (No. 17121414M), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81572786 and 91529303), startup funds from Mayo Clinic (Mayo Clinic Arizona and Center for Individualized Medicine) to JW, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11526144) and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong (No. 2016A030310038) to YH.

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICS GUIDELINES

The authors Jing Qin, Bin Yan, Yaohua Hu, Panwen Wang and Junwen Wang declare that they have no conflict of interests.ƒThis article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg