scholarly journals Integrative system biology and mathematical modeling of genetic networks identifies shared biomarkers for obesity and diabetes

2022 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 2310-2329
Author(s):  
Abdulhadi Ibrahim H. Bima ◽  
◽  
Ayman Zaky Elsamanoudy ◽  
Walaa F Albaqami ◽  
Zeenath Khan ◽  
...  

<abstract> <p>Obesity and type 2 and diabetes mellitus (T2D) are two dual epidemics whose shared genetic pathological mechanisms are still far from being fully understood. Therefore, this study is aimed at discovering key genes, molecular mechanisms, and new drug targets for obesity and T2D by analyzing the genome wide gene expression data with different computational biology approaches. In this study, the RNA-sequencing data of isolated primary human adipocytes from individuals who are lean, obese, and T2D was analyzed by an integrated framework consisting of gene expression, protein interaction network (PIN), tissue specificity, and druggability approaches. Our findings show a total of 1932 unique differentially expressed genes (DEGs) across the diabetes versus obese group comparison (p≤0.05). The PIN analysis of these 1932 DEGs identified 190 high centrality network (HCN) genes, which were annotated against 3367 GO terms and functional pathways, like response to insulin signaling, phosphorylation, lipid metabolism, glucose metabolism, etc. (p≤0.05). By applying additional PIN and topological parameters to 190 HCN genes, we further mapped 25 high confidence genes, functionally connected with diabetes and obesity traits. Interestingly, <italic>ERBB2, FN1, FYN, HSPA1A, HBA1</italic>, and <italic>ITGB1</italic> genes were found to be tractable by small chemicals, antibodies, and/or enzyme molecules. In conclusion, our study highlights the potential of computational biology methods in correlating expression data to topological parameters, functional relationships, and druggability characteristics of the candidate genes involved in complex metabolic disorders with a common etiological basis.</p> </abstract>

Biomolecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 403
Author(s):  
Kesavan R. Arya ◽  
Ramachandran P. Bharath Chand ◽  
Chandran S. Abhinand ◽  
Achuthsankar S. Nair ◽  
Oommen V. Oommen ◽  
...  

Anti-VEGF therapy is considered to be a useful therapeutic approach in many tumors, but the low efficacy and drug resistance limit its therapeutic potential and promote tumor growth through alternative mechanisms. We reanalyzed the gene expression data of xenografts of tumors of bevacizumab-resistant glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) patients, using bioinformatics tools, to understand the molecular mechanisms of this resistance. An analysis of the gene set data from three generations of xenografts, identified as 646, 873 and 1220, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the first, fourth and ninth generations, respectively, of the anti-VEGF-resistant GBM cells. Gene Ontology (GO) and pathway enrichment analyses demonstrated that the DEGs were significantly enriched in biological processes such as angiogenesis, cell proliferation, cell migration, and apoptosis. The protein–protein interaction network and module analysis revealed 21 hub genes, which were enriched in cancer pathways, the cell cycle, the HIF1 signaling pathway, and microRNAs in cancer. The VEGF pathway analysis revealed nine upregulated (IL6, EGFR, VEGFA, SRC, CXCL8, PTGS2, IDH1, APP, and SQSTM1) and five downregulated hub genes (POLR2H, RPS3, UBA52, CCNB1, and UBE2C) linked with several of the VEGF signaling pathway components. The survival analysis showed that three upregulated hub genes (CXCL8, VEGFA, and IDH1) were associated with poor survival. The results predict that these hub genes associated with the GBM resistance to bevacizumab may be potential therapeutic targets or can be biomarkers of the anti-VEGF resistance of GBM.


Author(s):  
Muying Wang ◽  
Heeju Noh ◽  
Ericka Mochan ◽  
Jason E. Shoemaker

AbstractTo improve the efficacy of drug research and development (R&D), a better understanding of drug mechanisms of action (MoA) is needed to improve drug discovery. Computational algorithms, such as ProTINA, that integrate protein-protein interactions (PPIs), protein-gene interactions (PGIs) and gene expression data have shown promising performance on drug target inference. In this work, we evaluated how network and gene expression data affect ProTINA’s accuracy. Network data predominantly determines the accuracy of ProTINA instead of gene expression, while the size of an interaction network or selecting cell/tissue-specific networks have limited effects on the accuracy. However, we found that protein network betweenness values showed high accuracy in predicting drug targets. Therefore, we suggested a new algorithm, TREAP (https://github.com/ImmuSystems-Lab/TREAP), that combines betweenness values and adjusted p-values for target inference. This algorithm has resulted in higher accuracy than ProTINA using the same datasets.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 216-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianyi Zhao ◽  
Donghua Wang ◽  
Yang Hu ◽  
Ningyi Zhang ◽  
Tianyi Zang ◽  
...  

Background: More and more scholars are trying to use it as a specific biomarker for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Multiple studies have indicated that miRNAs are associated with poor axonal growth and loss of synaptic structures, both of which are early events in AD. The overall loss of miRNA may be associated with aging, increasing the incidence of AD, and may also be involved in the disease through some specific molecular mechanisms. Objective: Identifying Alzheimer’s disease-related miRNA can help us find new drug targets, early diagnosis. Materials and Methods: We used genes as a bridge to connect AD and miRNAs. Firstly, proteinprotein interaction network is used to find more AD-related genes by known AD-related genes. Then, each miRNA’s correlation with these genes is obtained by miRNA-gene interaction. Finally, each miRNA could get a feature vector representing its correlation with AD. Unlike other studies, we do not generate negative samples randomly with using classification method to identify AD-related miRNAs. Here we use a semi-clustering method ‘one-class SVM’. AD-related miRNAs are considered as outliers and our aim is to identify the miRNAs that are similar to known AD-related miRNAs (outliers). Results and Conclusion: We identified 257 novel AD-related miRNAs and compare our method with SVM which is applied by generating negative samples. The AUC of our method is much higher than SVM and we did case studies to prove that our results are reliable.


Cancers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 983 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otília Menyhart ◽  
Tatsuhiko Kakisaka ◽  
Lőrinc Sándor Pongor ◽  
Hiroyuki Uetake ◽  
Ajay Goel ◽  
...  

Background: Numerous driver mutations have been identified in colorectal cancer (CRC), but their relevance to the development of targeted therapies remains elusive. The secondary effects of pathogenic driver mutations on downstream signaling pathways offer a potential approach for the identification of therapeutic targets. We aimed to identify differentially expressed genes as potential drug targets linked to driver mutations. Methods: Somatic mutations and the gene expression data of 582 CRC patients were utilized, incorporating the mutational status of 39,916 and the expression levels of 20,500 genes. To uncover candidate targets, the expression levels of various genes in wild-type and mutant cases for the most frequent disruptive mutations were compared with a Mann–Whitney test. A survival analysis was performed in 2100 patients with transcriptomic gene expression data. Up-regulated genes associated with worse survival were filtered for potentially actionable targets. The most significant hits were validated in an independent set of 171 CRC patients. Results: Altogether, 426 disruptive mutation-associated upregulated genes were identified. Among these, 95 were linked to worse recurrence-free survival (RFS). Based on the druggability filter, 37 potentially actionable targets were revealed. We selected seven genes and validated their expression in 171 patient specimens. The best independently validated combinations were DUSP4 (p = 2.6 × 10−12) in ACVR2A mutated (7.7%) patients; BMP4 (p = 1.6 × 10−04) in SOX9 mutated (8.1%) patients; TRIB2 (p = 1.35 × 10−14) in ACVR2A mutated patients; VSIG4 (p = 2.6 × 10−05) in ANK3 mutated (7.6%) patients, and DUSP4 (p = 7.1 × 10−04) in AMER1 mutated (8.2%) patients. Conclusions: The results uncovered potentially druggable genes in colorectal cancer. The identified mutations could enable future patient stratification for targeted therapy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict Hew ◽  
Qiao Wen Tan ◽  
William Goh ◽  
Jonathan Wei Xiong Ng ◽  
Kenny Koh ◽  
...  

AbstractBacterial resistance to antibiotics is a growing problem that is projected to cause more deaths than cancer in 2050. Consequently, novel antibiotics are urgently needed. Since more than half of the available antibiotics target the bacterial ribosomes, proteins that are involved in protein synthesis are thus prime targets for the development of novel antibiotics. However, experimental identification of these potential antibiotic target proteins can be labor-intensive and challenging, as these proteins are likely to be poorly characterized and specific to few bacteria. In order to identify these novel proteins, we established a Large-Scale Transcriptomic Analysis Pipeline in Crowd (LSTrAP-Crowd), where 285 individuals processed 26 terabytes of RNA-sequencing data of the 17 most notorious bacterial pathogens. In total, the crowd processed 26,269 RNA-seq experiments and used the data to construct gene co-expression networks, which were used to identify more than a hundred uncharacterized genes that were transcriptionally associated with protein synthesis. We provide the identity of these genes together with the processed gene expression data. The data can be used to identify other vulnerabilities or bacteria, while our approach demonstrates how the processing of gene expression data can be easily crowdsourced.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Ruddy ◽  
Marla Johnson ◽  
Elizabeth Purdom

The prevalence of sequencing experiments in genomics has led to an increased use of methods for count data in analyzing high-throughput genomic data to perform analyses. The importance of shrinkage methods in improving the performance of statistical methods remains. A common example is that of gene expression data, where the counts per gene are often modeled as some form of an over-dispersed Poisson. In this case, shrinkage estimates of the per-gene dispersion parameter have led to improved estimation of dispersion in the case of a small number of samples. We address a different count setting introduced by the use of sequencing data: comparing differential proportional usage via an over-dispersed binomial model. This is motivated by our interest in testing for differential exon skipping in mRNA-Seq experiments. We introduce a novel method that is developed by modeling the dispersion based on the double binomial distribution proposed by Efron (1986). Our method (WEB-Seq) is an empirical bayes strategy for producing a shrunken estimate of dispersion and effectively detects differential proportional usage, and has close ties to the weighted-likelihood strategy of edgeR developed for gene expression data (Robinson and Smyth, 2007; Robinson et al., 2010). We analyze its behavior on simulated data sets as well as real data and show that our method is fast, powerful and gives accurate control of the FDR compared to alternative approaches. We provide implementation of our methods in the R package DoubleExpSeq available on CRAN.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Shan Lin ◽  
Zhicheng Zou ◽  
Cuibing Zhou ◽  
Hancheng Zhang ◽  
Zhiming Cai

Caterpillar fungus is a well-known fungal Chinese medicine. To reveal molecular changes during early and late stages of adenosine biosynthesis, transcriptome analysis was performed with the anamorph strain of caterpillar fungus. A total of 2,764 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified (p≤0.05, |log2 Ratio| ≥ 1), of which 1,737 were up-regulated and 1,027 were down-regulated. Gene expression profiling on 4–10 d revealed a distinct shift in expression of the purine metabolism pathway. Differential expression of 17 selected DEGs which involved in purine metabolism (map00230) were validated by qPCR, and the expression trends were consistent with the RNA-Seq results. Subsequently, the predicted adenosine biosynthesis pathway combined with qPCR and gene expression data of RNA-Seq indicated that the increased adenosine accumulation is a result of down-regulation of ndk, ADK, and APRT genes combined with up-regulation of AK gene. This study will be valuable for understanding the molecular mechanisms of the adenosine biosynthesis in caterpillar fungus.


2015 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 444
Author(s):  
Ramesh C. Meena ◽  
Amitabha Chakrabarti

<p>The versatility of the yeast experimental model has aided in innumerable ways in the understanding of fundamental cellular functions and has also contributed towards the elucidation of molecular mechanisms underlying several pathological conditions in humans. Genome-wide expression, functional, localization and interaction studies on the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae exposed to various stressors have made profound contributions towards the understanding of stress response pathways. Analysis of gene expression data from S. cerevisiae cells indicate that the expression of a common set of genes is altered upon exposure to all the stress conditions examined. This common response to multiple stressors is known as the Environmental stress response. Knowledge gained from studies on the yeast model has now become helpful in understanding stress response pathways and associated disease conditions in humans. Cross-species microarray experiments and analysis of data with ever improving computational methods has led to a better comparison of gene expression data between diverse organisms that include yeast and humans.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Gao ◽  
Yong Jie Yang ◽  
En Qi Li ◽  
Jia Ning Mao

Objective Evidence indicates that physical activity influence bone health. However, the molecular mechanisms mediating the beneficial adaptations to exercise are not well understood. The purpose of this study was to examine the differentially expressed genes in PBMC between athletes and healthy controls, and to analyze the important functional genes and signal pathways that cause increased bone mineral density in athletes, in order to further reveal the molecular mechanisms of exercise promoting bone health. Methods Five professional trampoline athletes and five age-matched untrained college students participated in this study. Used the human expression Microarray V4.0 expression profiling chip to detect differentially expressed genes in the two groups, and performed KEGG Pathway analysis and application of STRING database to construct protein interaction Network; Real-Time PCR technology was used to verify the expression of some differential genes.  Results Compared with healthy controls, there were significant improvement in lumbar spine bone mineral density, and 236 up-regulated as well as 265 down-regulated in serum samples of athletes. The differentially expressed genes involved 28 signal pathways, such as cell adhesion molecules. Protein interaction network showed that MYC was at the core node position. Real-time PCR results showed that the expression levels of CD40 and ITGα6 genes in the athletes were up-regulated compared with the healthy controls, the detection results were consistent with that of the gene chip. Conclusions The findings highlight that long-term high-intensity trampoline training could induce transcriptional changes in PBMC of the athletes. These data suggest that gene expression fingerprints can serve as a powerful research tool to design novel strategies for monitoring exercise. The findings of the study also provide support for the notion that PBMC could be used as a substitute to study exercise training that affects bone health.


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