scholarly journals Gene co-expression in the interactome: moving from correlation toward causation via an integrated approach to disease module discovery

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Paci ◽  
Giulia Fiscon ◽  
Federica Conte ◽  
Rui-Sheng Wang ◽  
Lorenzo Farina ◽  
...  

AbstractIn this study, we integrate the outcomes of co-expression network analysis with the human interactome network to predict novel putative disease genes and modules. We first apply the SWItch Miner (SWIM) methodology, which predicts important (switch) genes within the co-expression network that regulate disease state transitions, then map them to the human protein–protein interaction network (PPI, or interactome) to predict novel disease–disease relationships (i.e., a SWIM-informed diseasome). Although the relevance of switch genes to an observed phenotype has been recently assessed, their performance at the system or network level constitutes a new, potentially fascinating territory yet to be explored. Quantifying the interplay between switch genes and human diseases in the interactome network, we found that switch genes associated with specific disorders are closer to each other than to other nodes in the network, and tend to form localized connected subnetworks. These subnetworks overlap between similar diseases and are situated in different neighborhoods for pathologically distinct phenotypes, consistent with the well-known topological proximity property of disease genes. These findings allow us to demonstrate how SWIM-based correlation network analysis can serve as a useful tool for efficient screening of potentially new disease gene associations. When integrated with an interactome-based network analysis, it not only identifies novel candidate disease genes, but also may offer testable hypotheses by which to elucidate the molecular underpinnings of human disease and reveal commonalities between seemingly unrelated diseases.

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Q. Jiang ◽  
Andreas W. M. Dress ◽  
Ming Chen

SummaryEmpirical clinical studies on the human interactome and phenome not only illustrates prevalent phenotypic overlap and genetic overlap between diseases, but also reveals a modular organization of the genetic landscape of human disease, provding new opportunities to reduce the complexity in dissecting the phenotype-genotype association. We here introduce a network-module based method towards phenotype-genotype association inference and disease gene identification. This approach incorporates protein-protein interaction network, phenotype similarity network and known phenotype-genotype associations into an assembled network. We then decomposes the resulted network into modules (or communities) wherein we identified and prioritized the disease genes from the candidates within the loci associated with the query disease using a linear regression model and concordance score. For the known phenotype-gene associations in the OMIM database, we used the leave-one-out validation to evaluate the feasibility of our method, and successfully ranked known disease genes at top 1 in 887 out of 1807 cases. Moreover, applying this approach on 850 OMIMloci characterized by an unknown molecular basis, we propose high-probability candidates for 81 genetic diseases.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. S20-S21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akram Safaei ◽  
Mostafa Rezaei Tavirani ◽  
Mona Zamanian Azodi ◽  
Alireza Lashay ◽  
Seyed Farzad Mohammadi ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Masoumeh Adhami ◽  
Balal Sadeghi ◽  
Ali Rezapour ◽  
Ali Akbar Haghdoost ◽  
Habib MotieGhader

Abstract Background The coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) emerged in Wuhan, China and rapidly spread worldwide. Researchers are trying to find a way to treat this disease as soon as possible. The present study aimed to identify the genes involved in COVID-19 and find a new drug target therapy. Currently, there are no effective drugs targeting SARS-CoV-2, and meanwhile, drug discovery approaches are time-consuming and costly. To address this challenge, this study utilized a network-based drug repurposing strategy to rapidly identify potential drugs targeting SARS-CoV-2. To this end, seven potential drugs were proposed for COVID-19 treatment using protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis. First, 524 proteins in humans that have interaction with the SARS-CoV-2 virus were collected, and then the PPI network was reconstructed for these collected proteins. Next, the target miRNAs of the mentioned module genes were separately obtained from the miRWalk 2.0 database because of the important role of miRNAs in biological processes and were reported as an important clue for future analysis. Finally, the list of the drugs targeting module genes was obtained from the DGIDb database, and the drug-gene network was separately reconstructed for the obtained protein modules. Results Based on the network analysis of the PPI network, seven clusters of proteins were specified as the complexes of proteins which are more associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Moreover, seven therapeutic candidate drugs were identified to control gene regulation in COVID-19. PACLITAXEL, as the most potent therapeutic candidate drug and previously mentioned as a therapy for COVID-19, had four gene targets in two different modules. The other six candidate drugs, namely, BORTEZOMIB, CARBOPLATIN, CRIZOTINIB, CYTARABINE, DAUNORUBICIN, and VORINOSTAT, some of which were previously discovered to be efficient against COVID-19, had three gene targets in different modules. Eventually, CARBOPLATIN, CRIZOTINIB, and CYTARABINE drugs were found as novel potential drugs to be investigated as a therapy for COVID-19. Conclusions Our computational strategy for predicting repurposable candidate drugs against COVID-19 provides efficacious and rapid results for therapeutic purposes. However, further experimental analysis and testing such as clinical applicability, toxicity, and experimental validations are required to reach a more accurate and improved treatment. Our proposed complexes of proteins and associated miRNAs, along with discovered candidate drugs might be a starting point for further analysis by other researchers in this urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 2959 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balqis Ramly ◽  
Nor Afiqah-Aleng ◽  
Zeti-Azura Mohamed-Hussein

Based on clinical observations, women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) are prone to developing several other diseases, such as metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. However, the molecular association between PCOS and these diseases remains poorly understood. Recent studies showed that the information from protein–protein interaction (PPI) network analysis are useful in understanding the disease association in detail. This study utilized this approach to deepen the knowledge on the association between PCOS and other diseases. A PPI network for PCOS was constructed using PCOS-related proteins (PCOSrp) obtained from PCOSBase. MCODE was used to identify highly connected regions in the PCOS network, known as subnetworks. These subnetworks represent protein families, where their molecular information is used to explain the association between PCOS and other diseases. Fisher’s exact test and comorbidity data were used to identify PCOS–disease subnetworks. Pathway enrichment analysis was performed on the PCOS–disease subnetworks to identify significant pathways that are highly involved in the PCOS–disease associations. Migraine, schizophrenia, depressive disorder, obesity, and hypertension, along with twelve other diseases, were identified to be highly associated with PCOS. The identification of significant pathways, such as ribosome biogenesis, antigen processing and presentation, and mitophagy, suggest their involvement in the association between PCOS and migraine, schizophrenia, and hypertension.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 117-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. UMADEVI ◽  
K. PREMKUMAR ◽  
S. VALARMATHI ◽  
P. M. AYYASAMY ◽  
S. RAJAKUMAR

Diabetic retinopathy is the most common cause of blindness, associated with many biochemical pathways mediated by several genes and proteins. Disease gene identification can be achieved through several approaches but still it is a challenging task. This study, aimed to find out the novel genes associated with diabetic retinopathy. In this study, all the well-known genes associated with diabetic retinopathy were collected from databases and the protein interaction partners were identified. The interacting candidate genes were chosen by chromosomal locations, sharing with disease genes. The protein–protein interaction network was constructed and the key nodes (genes) were identified by degree, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and eccentricity centrality. Further, the ontological terms, molecular function, biological process and cellular components were related with that of the disease genes with p-value [Formula: see text]. The genes UBC, FOS, ITGB1, FOXA2, CCND1, FOSL1, RXRA and NCAM1 were identified as potential genes associated with diabetic retinopathy. The molecular functions of these genes include protein binding, receptor activity, receptor binding, oxidoreductase activity, protein kinase activity, serine-type peptidase activity and growth factor. Many of the identified genes were clinically related as evidence by the literature.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Picart-Armada ◽  
Wesley K. Thompson ◽  
Alfonso Buil ◽  
Alexandre Perera-Lluna

AbstractMotivationNetwork diffusion and label propagation are fundamental tools in computational biology, with applications like gene-disease association, protein function prediction and module discovery. More recently, several publications have introduced a permutation analysis after the propagation process, due to concerns that network topology can bias diffusion scores. This opens the question of the statistical properties and the presence of bias of such diffusion processes in each of its applications. In this work, we characterised some common null models behind the permutation analysis and the statistical properties of the diffusion scores. We benchmarked seven diffusion scores on three case studies: synthetic signals on a yeast interactome, simulated differential gene expression on a protein-protein interaction network and prospective gene set prediction on another interaction network. For clarity, all the datasets were based on binary labels, but we also present theoretical results for quantitative labels.ResultsDiffusion scores starting from binary labels were affected by the label codification, and exhibited a problem-dependent topological bias that could be removed by the statistical normalisation. Parametric and non-parametric normalisation addressed both points by being codification-independent and by equalising the bias. We identified and quantified two sources of bias -mean value and variance- that yielded performance differences when normalising the scores. We provided closed formulae for both and showed how the null covariance is related to the spectral properties of the graph. Despite none of the proposed scores systematically outperformed the others, normalisation was preferred when the sought positive labels were not aligned with the bias. We conclude that the decision on bias removal should be problem and data-driven, i.e. based on a quantitative analysis of the bias and its relation to the positive entities.AvailabilityThe code is publicly available at https://github.com/b2slab/[email protected]


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