TY - JOUR T1 - Reverse enGENEering of regulatory networks from Big Data: a guide for a biologist JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/011056 SP - 011056 AU - Xiaoxi Dong, Postdoctoral scholar AU - Anatoly Yambartsev, Assistant professor AU - Stephen Ramsey, Assistant professor AU - Lina Thomas, Graduate student AU - Natalia Shulzhenko, Assistant professor AU - Andrey Morgun, Assistant professor Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/11/03/011056.abstract N2 - Omics technologies enable unbiased investigation of biological systems through massively parallel sequence acquisition or molecular measurements, bringing the life sciences into the era of Big Data. A central challenge posed by such omics datasets is how to transform this data into biological knowledge. For example, how to use this data to answer questions such as: which functional pathways are involved in cell differentiation? Which genes should we target to stop cancer? Network analysis is a powerful and general approach to solve this problem consisting of two fundamental stages, network reconstruction and network interrogation. Herein, we provide an overview of network analysis including a step by step guide on how to perform and use this approach to investigate a biological question. In this guide, we also include the software packages that we and others employ for each of the steps of a network analysis workflow. ER -