A free pre-conference tutorial organized by Young InfoLife in collaboration with CIBB 2026, the 21st International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics.

The reverse engineering of biological networks from omics data is one of the central problems in systems biology and bioinformatics. In particular, the inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from transcriptomic data involves reconstructing plausible regulatory relationships between genes from indirect measures of gene expression, obtained using technologies such as RNA-seq.

This problem is particularly relevant but also complex: transcriptomic datasets are often noisy, high-dimensional, and characterised by a number of genes far exceeding the number of available samples. The correct interpretation of the results requires a combination of biological, statistical, and computational expertise.

This tutorial guides participants through a complete reverse-engineering workflow, from data preparation to network evaluation, with an introductory and practical approach accessible also to those without prior experience in biological network inference.

Topics covered:

• biological and computational background of gene regulatory networks
• data inspection, normalization, transformation, gene filtering, exploratory analysis
• computational methods for regulatory network inference: correlation-based, mutual information-based, and regression-based approaches
• network evaluation: precision, recall, AUROC, AUPRC, and the limitations of accuracy in sparse biological networks
• critical interpretation of inferred regulatory interactions

Speakers:

• Dora Tortarolo, Università degli Studi di Torino
• Grete Francesca Privitera, Università degli Studi di Catania
• Roberto Pagliarini, Università degli Studi di Udine

Materials: all materials required to follow the tutorial and reproduce the analysis are provided, including slides, example transcriptomic datasets, scripts/notebooks for preprocessing and inference, step-by-step instructions, and reference networks. Recordings of preparatory webinars are made available on the Young InfoLife YouTube channel.

The event is part of CIBB 2026, taking place at Sapienza University of Rome on September 2-4, 2026.

Conference website: https://cibb2026.teralab.ai