Automatic generation of causal networks linking growth factor stimuli to functional cell state changes

Directed random walks and constraint programming reveal active pathways in hepatocyte growth factor signaling

An effective means to analyze mRNA expression data is to take advantage of established knowledge from pathway databases, using methods such as pathway-enrichment analyses. However, pathway databases are not case-specific and expression data could be used to infer gene-regulation patterns in the context of specific pathways. In addition, canonical pathways may not always describe the signaling mechanisms properly, because interactions can frequently occur between genes in different pathways. Relatively few methods have been proposed to date for generating and analyzing such networks, preserving the causality between gene interactions and reasoning over the qualitative logic of regulatory effects. We present an algorithm (MCWalk) integrated with a logic programming approach, to discover subgraphs in large-scale signaling networks by random walks in a fully automated pipeline. As an exemplary application, we uncover the signal transduction mechanisms in a gene interaction network describing hepatocyte growth factor-stimulated cell migration and proliferation from gene-expression measured with microarray and RT-qPCR using in-house perturbation experiments in a keratinocyte-fibroblast co-culture. The resulting subgraphs illustrate possible associations of hepatocyte growth factor receptor c-Met nodes, differentially expressed genes and cellular states. Using perturbation experiments and Answer Set programming, we are able to select those which are more consistent with the experimental data. We discover key regulator nodes by measuring the frequency with which they are traversed when connecting signaling between receptors and significantly regulated genes and predict their expression-shift consistently with the measured data. The Java implementation of MCWalk is publicly available under the MIT license at: https://bitbucket.org/akittas/biosubg.

Inferring interaction type in gene regulatory networks using co-expression data

Background

Knowledge of interaction types in biological networks is important for understanding the functional organization of the cell. Currently information-based approaches are widely used for inferring gene regulatory interactions from genomics data, such as gene expression profiles; however, these approaches do not provide evidence about the regulation type (positive or negative sign) of the interaction.

Results

This paper describes a novel algorithm, “Signing of Regulatory Networks” (SIREN), which can infer the regulatory type of interactions in a known gene regulatory network (GRN) given corresponding genome-wide gene expression data. To assess our new approach, we applied it to three different benchmark gene regulatory networks, including Escherichia coli, prostate cancer, and an in silico constructed network. Our new method has approximately 68, 70, and 100 percent accuracy, respectively, for these networks. To showcase the utility of SIREN algorithm, we used it to predict previously unknown regulation types for 454 interactions related to the prostate cancer GRN.

Conclusions

SIREN is an efficient algorithm with low computational complexity; hence, it is applicable to large biological networks. It can serve as a complementary approach for a wide range of network reconstruction methods that do not provide information about the interaction type.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13015-015-0054-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Systematic verification of upstream regulators of a computable cellular proliferation network model on non-diseased lung cells using a dedicated dataset

We recently constructed a computable cell proliferation network (CPN) model focused on lung tissue to unravel complex biological processes and their exposure-related perturbations from molecular profiling data. The CPN consists of edges and nodes representing upstream controllers of gene expression largely generated from transcriptomics datasets using Reverse Causal Reasoning (RCR). Here, we report an approach to biologically verify the correctness of upstream controller nodes using a specifically designed, independent lung cell proliferation dataset. Normal human bronchial epithelial cells were arrested at G1/S with a cell cycle inhibitor. Gene expression changes and cell proliferation were captured at different time points after release from inhibition. Gene set enrichment analysis demonstrated cell cycle response specificity via an overrepresentation of proliferation related gene sets. Coverage analysis of RCR-derived hypotheses returned statistical significance for cell cycle response specificity across the whole model as well as for the Growth Factor and Cell Cycle sub-network models.