Circular Isotone Regression with Application to cell-cycle Biology

Abstract

This work is motivated by a problem encountered in Molecular Biology where researchers are interested in correlating angular data from two oscillatory systems. The observations are the time to peak expression (also known as phase angle) of periodic genes under two different conditions (dose levels, organs or even species). In particular, we deal here with expression data from genes participating in the cell-cycle. Cell-biologists are often interested in drawing inferences regarding the phase angle of cell-cycle genes since they are considered to be associated with the gene’s biological function (Jensen et al 2006).