C.elegans is a saprophytic species that has been emerging as a standard model organism since the early 1960s. This species is useful in numerous fields, including developmental biology, neurobiology and ageing. A high-quality comprehensive molecular interaction network is needed to facilitate molecular mechanism studies in C. elegans.
Xin Chen and his colleagues presented the predicted functional interactome of C.elegans (FIC), which integrated functional association data from 10 public databases to infer functional gene interactions on diverse functional perspectives. Based on the functional gene association network of FIC, they developed a gene set linkage analysis (GSLA) web tool (http://worm.biomedtzc.cn) to interpret potential functional impacts from a set of differentially expressed genes observed in transcriptome analyses.
The FIC/GSLA system was a high-quality comprehensive and concise annotation database of predicted functional interactions among genes. The functional interactions in FIC served as a good reference interactome for GSLA to annotate differentially expressed genes for their potential functional impacts and help researchers understand the molecular mechanisms of complex genetic networks.
References:
Chen et al. (2020) Predicted functional interactome of Caenorhabditis elegans and a web tool for the functional interpretation of differentially expressed genes. Biology Direct. doi.org/10. 1186/s13062-020-00271-6
