The sixth DREAM consortium paper is out in Nature Methods. The consortium is a community effort for systematically comparing expression-based network inference methods. A major finding of the paper is that combining different methods has the best performance. This year’s competition analyzed datasets from  a simulated network, the E. coli regulatory network, and the yeast S. cerevisiae regulatory network. Methods do well in for simulated and E. coli, but the performance is poor for yeast.

From the cover: “An Escherichia coli ‘community’ gene regulatory network, constructed by combining the predictions of several network inference methods tested in the DREAM5 challenge. Cover by Erin Dewalt, based on an image provided by Valdo Peixoto and Daniel Marbach.”