Analysing the meta-interaction between pathways by gene set topological impact analysis

BMC Genomics

Xu Chi¹  Shen Yan²  Mengliang Tian²  Xiao Chang³ 

[1] Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 101300, Beijing, China;China National Center for Bioinformation, Chaoyang, 101300, Beijing, China;College of Agronomy, Sichuan Agricultural University, 611130, Chengdu, Sichuan, China;Department of Dermatology and Venereal Disease, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, 100053, Beijing, China;

关键词: Topological pathway analysis;    Algorithm development;    Functional module;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12864-020-07148-y

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPathway analysis is widely applied in transcriptome analysis. Given certain transcriptomic changes, current pathway analysis tools tend to search for the most impacted pathways, which provides insight into underlying biological mechanisms. Further refining of the enriched pathways and extracting functional modules by “crosstalk” analysis have been proposed. However, the upstream/downstream relationships between the modules, which may provide extra biological insights such as the coordination of different functional modules and the signal transduction flow have been ignored.ResultsTo quantitatively analyse the upstream/downstream relationships between functional modules, we developed a novel GEne Set Topological Impact Analysis (GESTIA), which could be used to assemble the enriched pathways and functional modules into a super-module with a topological structure. We showed the advantages of this analysis in the exploration of extra biological insight in addition to the individual enriched pathways and functional modules.ConclusionsGESTIA can be applied to a broad range of pathway/module analysis result. We hope that GESTIA may help researchers to get one additional step closer to understanding the molecular mechanism from the pathway/module analysis results.

【 授权许可】

CC BY