Interpreting Metabolomic Profiles using Unbiased Pathway Models

Human disease is heterogeneous, with similar disease phenotypes resulting from distinct combinations of genetic and environmental factors. Small-molecule profiling can address disease heterogeneity by evaluating the underlying biologic state of individuals through non-invasive interrogation of plasma metabolite levels. We analyzed metabolite profiles from an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) in 50 individuals, 25 with normal (NGT) and 25 with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Our focus was to elucidate underlying biologic processes. Although we initially found little overlap between changed metabolites and preconceived definitions of metabolic pathways, the use of unbiased network approaches identified significant concerted changes. Specifically, we derived a metabolic network with edges drawn between reactant and product nodes in individual reactions and between all substrates of individual enzymes and transporters. We searched for “active modules”—regions of the metabolic network enriched for changes in metabolite levels. Active modules identified relationships among changed metabolites and highlighted the importance of specific solute carriers in metabolite profiles. Furthermore, hierarchical clustering and principal component analysis demonstrated that changed metabolites in OGTT naturally grouped according to the activities of the System A and L amino acid transporters, the osmolyte carrier SLC6A12, and the mitochondrial aspartate-glutamate transporter SLC25A13. Comparison between NGT and IGT groups supported blunted glucose- and/or insulin-stimulated activities in the IGT group. Using unbiased pathway models, we offer evidence supporting the important role of solute carriers in the physiologic response to glucose challenge and conclude that carrier activities are reflected in individual metabolite profiles of perturbation experiments. Given the involvement of transporters in human disease, metabolite profiling may contribute to improved disease classification via the interrogation of specific transporter activities

Pairwise gene GO-based measures for biclustering of high-dimensional expression data

Background: Biclustering algorithms search for groups of genes that share the same behavior under a subset of samples in gene expression data. Nowadays, the biological knowledge available in public repositories can be used to drive these algorithms to find biclusters composed of groups of genes functionally coherent. On the other hand, a distance among genes can be defined according to their information stored in Gene Ontology (GO). Gene pairwise GO semantic similarity measures report a value for each pair of genes which establishes their functional similarity. A scatter search-based algorithm that optimizes a merit function that integrates GO information is studied in this paper. This merit function uses a term that addresses the information through a GO measure. Results: The effect of two possible different gene pairwise GO measures on the performance of the algorithm is analyzed. Firstly, three well known yeast datasets with approximately one thousand of genes are studied. Secondly, a group of human datasets related to clinical data of cancer is also explored by the algorithm. Most of these data are high-dimensional datasets composed of a huge number of genes. The resultant biclusters reveal groups of genes linked by a same functionality when the search procedure is driven by one of the proposed GO measures. Furthermore, a qualitative biological study of a group of biclusters show their relevance from a cancer disease perspective. Conclusions: It can be concluded that the integration of biological information improves the performance of the biclustering process. The two different GO measures studied show an improvement in the results obtained for the yeast dataset. However, if datasets are composed of a huge number of genes, only one of them really improves the algorithm performance. This second case constitutes a clear option to explore interesting datasets from a clinical point of view.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2014-55894-C2-

Fault Tolerance in Protein Interaction Networks: Stable Bipartite Subgraphs and Redundant Pathways

As increasing amounts of high-throughput data for the yeast interactome become available, more system-wide properties are uncovered. One interesting question concerns the fault tolerance of protein interaction networks: whether there exist alternative pathways that can perform some required function if a gene essential to the main mechanism is defective, absent or suppressed. A signature pattern for redundant pathways is the BPM (between-pathway model) motif, introduced by Kelley and Ideker. Past methods proposed to search the yeast interactome for BPM motifs have had several important limitations. First, they have been driven heuristically by local greedy searches, which can lead to the inclusion of extra genes that may not belong in the motif; second, they have been validated solely by functional coherence of the putative pathways using GO enrichment, making it difficult to evaluate putative BPMs in the absence of already known biological annotation. We introduce stable bipartite subgraphs, and show they form a clean and efficient way of generating meaningful BPMs which naturally discard extra genes included by local greedy methods. We show by GO enrichment measures that our BPM set outperforms previous work, covering more known complexes and functional pathways. Perhaps most importantly, since our BPMs are initially generated by examining the genetic-interaction network only, the location of edges in the protein-protein physical interaction network can then be used to statistically validate each candidate BPM, even with sparse GO annotation (or none at all). We uncover some interesting biological examples of previously unknown putative redundant pathways in such areas as vesicle-mediated transport and DNA repair

Short-Term Calorie Restriction in Male Mice Feminizes Gene Expression and Alters Key Regulators of Conserved Aging Regulatory Pathways

Background: Calorie restriction (CR) is the only intervention known to extend lifespan in a wide range of organisms, including mammals. However, the mechanisms by which it regulates mammalian aging remain largely unknown, and the involvement of the TOR and sirtuin pathways (which regulate aging in simpler organisms) remain controversial. Additionally, females of most mammals appear to live longer than males within species; and, although it remains unclear whether this holds true for mice, the relationship between sex-biased and CR-induced gene expression remains largely unexplored. Methodology/Principal Findings: We generated microarray gene expression data from livers of male mice fed high calorie or CR diets, and we find that CR significantly changes the expression of over 3,000 genes, many between 10- and 50-fold. We compare our data to the GenAge database of known aging-related genes and to prior microarray expression data of genes expressed differently between male and female mice. CR generally feminizes gene expression and many of the most significantly changed individual genes are involved in aging, hormone signaling, and p53-associated regulation of the cell cycle and apoptosis. Among the genes showing the largest and most statistically significant CR-induced expression differences are Ddit4, a key regulator of the TOR pathway, and Nnmt, a regulator of lifespan linked to the sirtuin pathway. Using western analysis we confirmed post-translational inhibition of the TOR pathway. Conclusions: Our data show that CR induces widespread gene expression changes and acts through highly evolutionarily conserved pathways, from microorganisms to mammals, and that its life-extension effects might arise partly from a shift toward a gene expression profile more typical of females

Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Modules in Cancer Cell Cycle by Multi-Source Data Integration

Precise regulation of the cell cycle is crucial to the growth and development of all organisms. Understanding the regulatory mechanism of the cell cycle is crucial to unraveling many complicated diseases, most notably cancer. Multiple sources of biological data are available to study the dynamic interactions among many genes that are related to the cancer cell cycle. Integrating these informative and complementary data sources can help to infer a mutually consistent gene transcriptional regulatory network with strong similarity to the underlying gene regulatory relationships in cancer cells.We propose an integrative framework that infers gene regulatory modules from the cell cycle of cancer cells by incorporating multiple sources of biological data, including gene expression profiles, gene ontology, and molecular interaction. Among 846 human genes with putative roles in cell cycle regulation, we identified 46 transcription factors and 39 gene ontology groups. We reconstructed regulatory modules to infer the underlying regulatory relationships. Four regulatory network motifs were identified from the interaction network. The relationship between each transcription factor and predicted target gene groups was examined by training a recurrent neural network whose topology mimics the network motif(s) to which the transcription factor was assigned. Inferred network motifs related to eight well-known cell cycle genes were confirmed by gene set enrichment analysis, binding site enrichment analysis, and comparison with previously published experimental results.We established a robust method that can accurately infer underlying relationships between a given transcription factor and its downstream target genes by integrating different layers of biological data. Our method could also be beneficial to biologists for predicting the components of regulatory modules in which any candidate gene is involved. Such predictions can then be used to design a more streamlined experimental approach for biological validation. Understanding the dynamics of these modules will shed light on the processes that occur in cancer cells resulting from errors in cell cycle regulation

Negative Correlation Aided Network Module Extraction

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a method to construct an unweighted co-expression network that considers both positive and negative correlation among gene expressions. A measure named NCNMRS(Negative Correlation aided Normalized Mean Residue Similarity) is introduced. The measure can detect both of these correlations and it is used to determine whether a pair of genes are highly correlated either in terms of positive correlation or negative correlation. A greedy technique is also proposed to extract modules from unweighted network. The technique picks a pair of genes with next highest NCNMRS score at a time such that none of the genes in the pair has been included in any network module extracted so far and extends this partial module to a complete network module including genes with high connectivity into the partial module. The technique was applied on a number of real life gene expression datasets and the results have high biological relevance

Techniques for transferring host-pathogen protein interactions knowledge to new tasks

We consider the problem of building a model to predict protein-protein interactions (PPIs) between the bacterial species Salmonella Typhimurium and the plant host Arabidopsis thaliana which is a host-pathogen pair for which no known PPIs are available. To achieve this, we present approaches, which use homology and statistical learning methods called “transfer learning.” In the transfer learning setting, the task of predicting PPIs between Arabidopsis and its pathogen S. Typhimurium is called the “target task.” The presented approaches utilize labeled data i.e., known PPIs of other host-pathogen pairs (we call these PPIs the “source tasks”). The homology based approaches use heuristics based on biological intuition to predict PPIs. The transfer learning methods use the similarity of the PPIs from the source tasks to the target task to build a model. For a quantitative evaluation we consider Salmonella-mouse PPI prediction and some other host-pathogen tasks where known PPIs exist. We use metrics such as precision and recall and our results show that our methods perform well on the target task in various transfer settings. We present a brief qualitative analysis of the Arabidopsis-Salmonella predicted interactions. We filter the predictions from all approaches using Gene Ontology term enrichment and only those interactions involving Salmonella effectors. Thereby we observe that Arabidopsis proteins involved e.g., in transcriptional regulation, hormone mediated signaling and defense response may be affected by Salmonella