Feed-forward loop in biological regulation network
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To analyze regulatory relation of miRNA, lncRNA, transcript factor (TF) and target gene in an integrated way, we employed biological interaction network to represent and visualize these regulatory relations. Feed-forward loop (FFL) is a kind of small regulatory network (motif) which is comprised by 3 nodes (miRNAs/lncRNA, TF and target gene). FFL may show some specific regulatory relation in biological network (Shen-Orr SS et al., 2002). We developed an algorithm to search FFLs from big network efficiently and a tool to visualize FFL. And we applied a Chinese patent for this achievement (I am the first inventor), https://patents.google.com/patent/CN103870876B/en.
Fig. project1: an example of FFL