Bioinformática aplicada a biología integrativa y de sistemas en cáncer

Máster Universitario en Biología y Clínica del Cáncer: Programa, Objetivos y Metodología.Peer Reviewe

Protein-protein interaction networks: unraveling the wiring of molecular machines within the cell

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.Mapping and understanding of the protein interaction networks with their key modules and hubs can provide deeper insights into the molecular machinery underlying complex phenotypes. In this article, we present the basic characteristics and definitions of protein networks, starting with a distinction of the different types of associations between proteins. We focus the review on protein-protein interactions (PPIs), a subset of associations defined as physical contacts between proteins that occur by selective molecular docking in a particular biological context. We present such definition as opposed to other types of protein associations derived from regulatory, genetic, structural or functional relations. To determine PPIs, a variety of binary and co-complex methods exist; however, not all the technologies provide the same information and data quality. A way of increasing confidence in a given protein interaction is to integrate orthogonal experimental evidences. The use of several complementary methods testing each single interaction assesses the accuracy of PPI data and tries to minimize the occurrence of false interactions. Following this approach there have been important efforts to unify primary databases of experimentally proven PPIs into integrated databases. These meta-databases provide a measure of the confidence of interactions based on the number of experimental proofs that report them. As a conclusion, we can state that integrated information allows the building of more reliable interaction networks. Identification of communities, cliques, modules and hubs by analysing the topological parameters and graph properties of the protein networks allows the discovery of central/critical nodes, which are candidates to regulate cellular flux and dynamics.This work was supported by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) [project iLINK0398]; the Spanish Government (ISCiii) [project PS09/00843]; and the European Commission [project FP7-HEALTH-2007-223411].Peer Reviewe

APID: Agile Protein Interaction DataAnalyzer

Agile Protein Interaction DataAnalyzer (APID) is an interactive bioinformatics web tool developed to integrate and analyze in a unified and comparative platform main currently known information about protein–protein interactions demonstrated by specific small-scale or large-scale experimental methods. At present, the application includes information coming from five main source databases enclosing an unified sever to explore >35 000 different proteins and 111 000 different proven interactions. The web includes search tools to query and browse upon the data, allowing selection of the interaction pairs based in calculated parameters that weight and qualify the reliability of each given protein interaction. Such parameters are for the ‘proteins’: connectivity, cluster coefficient, Gene Ontology (GO) functional environment, GO environment enrichment; and for the ‘interactions’: number of methods, GO overlapping, iPfam domain–domain interaction. APID also includes a graphic interactive tool to visualize selected sub-networks and to navigate on them or along the whole interaction network. The application is available open access at

Interactome Data and Databases: Different Types of Protein Interaction

In recent years, the biomolecular sciences have been driven forward by overwhelming advances in new biotechnological high-throughput experimental methods and bioinformatic genome-wide computational methods. Such breakthroughs are producing huge amounts of new data that need to be carefully analysed to obtain correct and useful scientific knowledge. One of the fields where this advance has become more intense is the study of the network of ‘protein–protein interactions’, i.e. the ‘interactome’. In this short review we comment on the main data and databases produced in this field in last 5 years. We also present a rationalized scheme of biological definitions that will be useful for a better understanding and interpretation of ‘what a protein–protein interaction is’ and ‘which types of protein–protein interactions are found in a living cell’. Finally, we comment on some assignments of interactome data to defined types of protein interaction and we present a new bioinformatic tool called APIN (Agile Protein Interaction Network browser), which is in development and will be applied to browsing protein interaction databases

Combining dissimilarities in a hyper reproducing kernel hilbert space for complex human cancer prediction

9 páginas, 3 tablas.-- This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.DNA microarrays provide rich profiles that are used in cancer prediction considering the gene expression levels across a collection of related samples. Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been applied to the classification of cancer samples with encouraging results. However, they rely on Euclidean distances that fail to reflect accurately the proximities among sample profiles. Then, non-Euclidean dissimilarities provide additional information that should be considered to reduce the misclassification errors. In this paper, we incorporate in the -SVM algorithm a linear combination of non-Euclidean dissimilarities. The weights of the combination are learnt in a (Hyper Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space) HRKHS using a Semidefinite Programming algorithm. This approach allows us to incorporate a smoothing term that penalizes the complexity of the family of distances and avoids overfitting. The experimental results suggest that the method proposed helps to reduce the misclassification errors in several human cancer problems. © 2009 Manuel Mart́n-Merino et al.Financial support from Grant S02EIA-07L01.Peer Reviewe

PSICQUIC and PSISCORE: accessing and scoring molecular interactions

To the Editor.-- Author Manuscript.-- et al.This study was supported by the European Commission under the Serving Life-science Information for the Next Generation contract 226073; Proteomics Standards Initiative and International Molecular Exchange contract FP7-HEALTH-2007-223411; Apoptosis Systems Biology Applied to Cancer and AIDS contract FP7-HEALTH-2007-200767; Experimental Network for Functional Integration contract LSHG-CT-2005-518254; German National Genome Research Network; German Research Foundation contract KFO 129/1-2; US National Institutes of Health grant R01GM071909; the Italian Association for Cancer Research; a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute for Chemogenomics Databases; Grand Challenges in Global Health Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and Genome British Columbia; and a German Research Foundation–funded Cluster of Excellence for Multimodal Computing and Interaction.Peer Reviewe

Combining Dissimilarities in a Hyper Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space for Complex Human Cancer Prediction

DNA microarrays provide rich profiles that are used in cancer prediction considering the gene expression levels across a collection of related samples. Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been applied to the classification of cancer samples with encouraging results. However, they rely on Euclidean distances that fail to reflect accurately the proximities among sample profiles. Then, non-Euclidean dissimilarities provide additional information that should be considered to reduce the misclassification errors. In this paper, we incorporate in the ν-SVM algorithm a linear combination of non-Euclidean dissimilarities. The weights of the combination are learnt in a (Hyper Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space) HRKHS using a Semidefinite Programming algorithm. This approach allows us to incorporate a smoothing term that penalizes the complexity of the family of distances and avoids overfitting. The experimental results suggest that the method proposed helps to reduce the misclassification errors in several human cancer problems

Functional Gene Networks: R/Bioc package to generate and analyse gene networks derived from functional enrichment and clustering

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.Functional Gene Networks (FGNet) is an R/Bioconductor package that generates gene networks derived from the results of functional enrichment analysis (FEA) and annotation clustering. The sets of genes enriched with specific biological terms (obtained from a FEA platform) are transformed into a network by establishing links between genes based on common functional annotations and common clusters. The network provides a new view of FEA results revealing gene modules with similar functions and genes that are related to multiple functions. In addition to building the functional network, FGNet analyses the similarity between the groups of genes and provides a distance heatmap and a bipartite network of functionally overlapping genes. The application includes an interface to directly perform FEA queries using different external tools: DAVID, GeneTerm Linker, TopGO or GAGE; and a graphical interface to facilitate the use.This work was supported by the “Accion Estrategica en Salud” (AES) of the “Instituto de Salud Carlos III” (ISCiii) from the Spanish Government (projects granted to J.D.L.R.: PS09/00843 and PI12/00624); and by the “Consejeria de Educación” of the “Junta Castilla y León” (JCyL) and the European Social Fund (ESF) with grants given to S.A. and C.D.Peer Reviewe

A proteome-scale map of the human interactome network

PMCID: PMC4266588.-- et al.Just as reference genome sequences revolutionized human genetics, reference maps of interactome networks will be critical to fully understand genotype-phenotype relationships. Here, we describe a systematic map of ∼14,000 high-quality human binary protein-protein interactions. At equal quality, this map is ∼30% larger than what is available from small-scale studies published in the literature in the last few decades. While currently available information is highly biased and only covers a relatively small portion of the proteome, our systematic map appears strikingly more homogeneous, revealing a >broader> human interactome network than currently appreciated. The map also uncovers significant interconnectivity between known and candidate cancer gene products, providing unbiased evidence for an expanded functional cancer landscape, while demonstrating how high-quality interactome models will help >connect the dots> of the genomic revolution.This work was supported primarily by NHGRI grant R01/U01HG001715 awarded to M.V., D.E.H., F.P.R., and J.T. and in part by the following grants and agencies: NHGRI P50HG004233 to M.V., F.P.R., and A.-L.B.; NHLBI U01HL098166 subaward to M.V.; NHLBI U01HL108630 subaward to A.-L.B.; NCI U54CA112962 subaward to M.V.; NCI R33CA132073 to M.V.; NIH RC4HG006066 to M.V., D.E.H., and T.H.; NICHD ARRA R01HD065288, R21MH104766, and R01MH105524 to L.M.I.; NIMH R01MH091350 to L.M.I. and T.H.; NSF CCF-1219007 and NSERC RGPIN-2014-03892 to Y.X.; Canada Excellence Research Chair, Krembil Foundation, Ontario Research Fund–Research Excellence Award, Avon Foundation, grant CSI07A09 from Junta de Castilla y Leon (Valladolid, Spain), grant PI12/00624 from Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (AES 2012, ISCiii, Madrid, Spain), and grant i-Link0398 from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Madrid, Spain) to J.D.L.R.; Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (BIO2010-22073) and the European Commission through the FP7 project SyStemAge grant agreement n: 306240 to P.A.; Group-ID Multidisciplinary Research Partnerships of Ghent University, grant FWO-V G.0864.10 from the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders and ERC Advanced Grant N° 340941 to J.T.; EMBO long-term fellowship to A.K.; Institute Sponsored Research funds from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Strategic Initiative to M.V. I.L. is a postdoctoral fellow with the FWO-V. M.V. is a “Chercheur Qualifié Honoraire” from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, Wallonia-Brussels Federation, Belgium). Since performing the work described, C. Fontanillo has become an employee of Celgene Research SL, part of the Celgene Corporation.Peer Reviewe

GATExplorer: Genomic and Transcriptomic Explorer; mapping expression probes to gene loci, transcripts, exons and ncRNAs

Background: Genome-wide expression studies have developed exponentially in recent years as a result of extensive use of microarray technology. However, expression signals are typically calculated using the assignment of "probesets" to genes, without addressing the problem of "gene" definition or proper consideration of the location of the measuring probes in the context of the currently known genomes and transcriptomes. Moreover, as our knowledge of metazoan genomes improves, the number of both protein-coding and noncoding genes, as well as their associated isoforms, continues to increase. Consequently, there is a need for new databases that combine genomic and transcriptomic information and provide updated mapping of expression probes to current genomic annotations.Results: GATExplorer (Genomic and Transcriptomic Explorer) is a database and web platform that integrates a gene loci browser with nucleotide level mappings of oligo probes from expression microarrays. It allows interactive exploration of gene loci, transcripts and exons of human, mouse and rat genomes, and shows the specific location of all mappable Affymetrix microarray probes and their respective expression levels in a broad set of biological samples. The web site allows visualization of probes in their genomic context together with any associated protein-coding or noncoding transcripts. In the case of all-exon arrays, this provides a means by which the expression of the individual exons within a gene can be compared, thereby facilitating the identification and analysis of alternatively spliced exons. The application integrates data from four major source databases: Ensembl, RNAdb, Affymetrix and GeneAtlas; and it provides the users with a series of files and packages (R CDFs) to analyze particular query expression datasets. The maps cover both the widely used Affymetrix GeneChip microarrays based on 3' expression (e.g. human HG U133 series) and the all-exon expression microarrays (Gene 1.0 and Exon 1.0).Conclusions: GATExplorer is an integrated database that combines genomic/transcriptomic visualization with nucleotide-level probe mapping. By considering expression at the nucleotide level rather than the gene level, it shows that the arrays detect expression signals from entities that most researchers do not contemplate or discriminate. This approach provides the means to undertake a higher resolution analysis of microarray data and potentially extract considerably more detailed and biologically accurate information from existing and future microarray experiments