Topological network alignment uncovers biological function and phylogeny

Sequence comparison and alignment has had an enormous impact on our understanding of evolution, biology, and disease. Comparison and alignment of biological networks will likely have a similar impact. Existing network alignments use information external to the networks, such as sequence, because no good algorithm for purely topological alignment has yet been devised. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm based solely on network topology, that can be used to align any two networks. We apply it to biological networks to produce by far the most complete topological alignments of biological networks to date. We demonstrate that both species phylogeny and detailed biological function of individual proteins can be extracted from our alignments. Topology-based alignments have the potential to provide a completely new, independent source of phylogenetic information. Our alignment of the protein-protein interaction networks of two very different species--yeast and human--indicate that even distant species share a surprising amount of network topology with each other, suggesting broad similarities in internal cellular wiring across all life on Earth.Comment: Algorithm explained in more details. Additional analysis adde

Efficiency and Power as a Function of Sequence Coverage, SNP Array Density, and Imputation

High coverage whole genome sequencing provides near complete information about genetic variation. However, other technologies can be more efficient in some settings by (a) reducing redundant coverage within samples and (b) exploiting patterns of genetic variation across samples. To characterize as many samples as possible, many genetic studies therefore employ lower coverage sequencing or SNP array genotyping coupled to statistical imputation. To compare these approaches individually and in conjunction, we developed a statistical framework to estimate genotypes jointly from sequence reads, array intensities, and imputation. In European samples, we find similar sensitivity (89%) and specificity (99.6%) from imputation with either 1× sequencing or 1 M SNP arrays. Sensitivity is increased, particularly for low-frequency polymorphisms (MAF <5%), when low coverage sequence reads are added to dense genome-wide SNP arrays — the converse, however, is not true. At sites where sequence reads and array intensities produce different sample genotypes, joint analysis reduces genotype errors and identifies novel error modes. Our joint framework informs the use of next-generation sequencing in genome wide association studies and supports development of improved methods for genotype calling

Using multiple alignments to improve seeded local alignment algorithms

Multiple alignments among genomes are becoming increasingly prevalent. This trend motivates the development of tools for efficient homology search between a query sequence and a database of multiple alignments. In this paper, we present an algorithm that uses the information implicit in a multiple alignment to dynamically build an index that is weighted most heavily towards the promising regions of the multiple alignment. We have implemented Typhon, a local alignment tool that incorporates our indexing algorithm, which our test results show to be more sensitive than algorithms that index only a sequence. This suggests that when applied on a whole-genome scale, Typhon should provide improved homology searches in time comparable to existing algorithms

Network Archaeology: Uncovering Ancient Networks from Present-day Interactions

Often questions arise about old or extinct networks. What proteins interacted in a long-extinct ancestor species of yeast? Who were the central players in the Last.fm social network 3 years ago? Our ability to answer such questions has been limited by the unavailability of past versions of networks. To overcome these limitations, we propose several algorithms for reconstructing a network's history of growth given only the network as it exists today and a generative model by which the network is believed to have evolved. Our likelihood-based method finds a probable previous state of the network by reversing the forward growth model. This approach retains node identities so that the history of individual nodes can be tracked. We apply these algorithms to uncover older, non-extant biological and social networks believed to have grown via several models, including duplication-mutation with complementarity, forest fire, and preferential attachment. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, we find that our algorithms can estimate node arrival times, identify anchor nodes from which new nodes copy links, and can reveal significant features of networks that have long since disappeared.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure

Refining the accuracy of validated target identification through coding variant fine-mapping in type 2 diabetes.

We aggregated coding variant data for 81,412 type 2 diabetes cases and 370,832 controls of diverse ancestry, identifying 40 coding variant association signals (P &lt; 2.2 × 10-7); of these, 16 map outside known risk-associated loci. We make two important observations. First, only five of these signals are driven by low-frequency variants: even for these, effect sizes are modest (odds ratio ≤1.29). Second, when we used large-scale genome-wide association data to fine-map the associated variants in their regional context, accounting for the global enrichment of complex trait associations in coding sequence, compelling evidence for coding variant causality was obtained for only 16 signals. At 13 others, the associated coding variants clearly represent 'false leads' with potential to generate erroneous mechanistic inference. Coding variant associations offer a direct route to biological insight for complex diseases and identification of validated therapeutic targets; however, appropriate mechanistic inference requires careful specification of their causal contribution to disease predisposition

Optimizing a global alignment of protein interaction networks

Motivation: The global alignment of protein interaction networks is a widely studied problem. It is an important first step in understanding the relationship between the proteins in different species and identifying functional orthologs. Furthermore, it can provide useful insights into the species’ evolution. Results: We propose a novel algorithm, PISwap, for optimizing global pairwise alignments of protein interaction networks, based on a local optimization heuristic that has previously demonstrated its effectiveness for a variety of other intractable problems. PISwap can begin with different types of network alignment approaches and then iteratively adjust the initial alignments by incorporating network topology information, trading it off for sequence information. In practice, our algorithm efficiently refines other well-studied alignment techniques with almost no additional time cost. We also show the robustness of the algorithm to noise in protein interaction data. In addition, the flexible nature of this algorithm makes it suitable for different applications of network alignment. This algorithm can yield interesting insights into the evolutionary dynamics of related species. Availability: Our software is freely available for non-commercial purposes from our Web site, http://piswap.csail.mit.edu/.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant GM081871