About the Authors

Xizeng Mao

Contributed equally to this work with: Xizeng Mao, Xin Chen

Affiliations Computational Systems Biology Lab, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States of America, BESC BioEnergy Science Center, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States of America

Xin Chen

Contributed equally to this work with: Xizeng Mao, Xin Chen

Affiliations College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Jilin, Changchun, China, Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Jilin, Changchun, China

Yu Zhang

Affiliations College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Jilin, Changchun, China, Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Jilin, Changchun, China

Spencer Pangle

Affiliation Computational Systems Biology Lab, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States of America

Ying Xu

xyn@bmb.uga.edu

Affiliations Computational Systems Biology Lab, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States of America, BESC BioEnergy Science Center, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States of America, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Jilin, Changchun, China

Competing Interests

The authors have the following interest. In this paper, the authors present a web-based network-synthesis system, CINPER, to assist a biologist user to build a user-specified gene network for a prokaryotic organism in an intuitive manner. There are no further patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: XM YX. Performed the experiments: XM XC. Analyzed the data: XM XC SP. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: YZ. Wrote the paper: XM XC YX.