From gene to biomolecular networks: a review of evidences for understanding complex biological function in plants

Abstract

Although at the infancy stage, biomolecular network biology is a comprehensive approach to understand complex biological function in plants. Recent advancements in the accumulation of multi-omics data coupled with computational approach have accelerated our current understanding of the complexities of gene function at the system level. Biomolecular networks such as protein-protein interaction, co-expression and gene regulatory networks have extensively been used to decipher the intricacies of transcriptional reprogramming of hundreds of genes and their regulatory interaction in response to various environmental perturbations mainly in the model plant Arabidopsis. This review describes recent applications of network-based approaches to understand the biological functions in plants and focuses on the challenges and opportunities to harness the full potential of the approach.