Designing and conducting experiments are routine practices for modern biologists. The real challenge, especially in the post-genome era, usually comes not from acquiring data, but from subsequent activities such as data processing, analysis, knowledge generation and gaining insight into the research question of interest. The approach of inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) has been flourishing for many years, and new methods from mathematics, information science, engineering and social sciences have been applied. We review different kinds of computational methods biologists use to infer networks of varying levels of accuracy and complexity. The primary concern of biologists is how to translate the inferred network into hypotheses that can be tested with real-life experiments. Taking the biologists' viewpoint, we scrutinized several methods for predicting GRNs in mammalian cells, and more importantly show how the power of different knowledge databases of different types can be used to identify modules and subnetworks, thereby reducing complexity and facilitating the generation of testable hypotheses.

In the yeast protein-protein interaction network, motif mode, a collection of motifs of special combinations of protein nodes annotated by the molecular function terms of the Gene Ontology, has revealed differences in the conservation constraints within the same topology. In this study, by employing an intelligent agent-based distributed computing method, we are able to discover motif modes in a fast and adaptive manner. Moreover, by focusing on the highly evolutionarily conserved motif modes belonging to the same biological function, we find a large downshift in the distance between nodes belonging to the same motif mode compared with the whole, suggesting that nodes with the same motif mode tend to congregate in a network. Several motif modes with a high conservation of the motif constituents were revealed, but from a new perspective, including that with a three-node motif mode engaged in the protein fate and that with three four-node motif modes involved in the genome maintenance, cellular organization, and transcription. The network motif modes discovered from this method can be linked to the wealth of biological data which require further elucidation with regard to biological functions.