Wisdom of crowds to infer gene networks, published on Nature Methods, 15 July 2012.
This publication shows for the first time a community-wide effort to infer gene networks. The work resulted in an improved gene network from the model organism Escherichia coli and a completely novel gene network from the pathogenic bacterium Staphylococcus aureus . I asked Alberto de la Fuente (CRS4, Dream5 consortium) to explain objectives and methods of this research. What is the main idea of this research? "The idea is that we addressed network inference as a community, as a 'crowd'. Many groups from all over the world inferred networks from the same data. It is shown in this paper that creating a 'community consensus' network from all the different inferred networks is more reliable than any of the individual networks. Hence, the crowd is 'wiser' than any of the individuals in it". What is the role played by you and your collegues of CRS4 into the Dream5 consortium (Andrea Pinna, Vincenzo De Leo and Nicola Soranzo)? "We were one of...