  There have been several studies of the genome-wide temporal transcriptional
program of viruses, based on microarray experiments, which are generally useful
in the construction of gene regulation network. It seems that biological
interpretations in these studies are directly based on the normalized data and
some crude statistics, which provide rough estimates of limited features of the
profile and may incur biases. This paper introduces a hierarchical Bayesian
shape restricted regression method for making inference on the time course
expression of virus genes. Estimates of many salient features of the expression
profile like onset time, inflection point, maximum value, time to maximum
value, area under curve, etc. can be obtained immediately by this method.
Applying this method to a baculovirus microarray time course expression data
set, we indicate that many biological questions can be formulated
quantitatively and we are able to offer insights into the baculovirus biology.
