Today I was among the audience of Prof. John Quackenbush, the well known scientist in microarray data analysis from Harvard School of Public Health. He presented a network approach his team has adopted to build up a directional interaction network of genes by integrating gene expression variations into a literature-based network of protein-protein interactions. The interesting point in his presentation was integration of an additional layer of information, namely RNAi knock-out array.
His answer to my question about existence of public repositories for accessing RNAi array data was frustrating:“No such a public database exists”. Although profiling microRNA gene expression has not got that much popularity yet, thinking of storing these expression data in a publicly available database can motivate systems biologists to add an additional “informative” dimensionality to their predictive models.