CytoITMprobe: a network information flow plugin for Cytoscape

Extensive rewiring of the EGFR network in colorectal cancer cells expressing transforming levels of KRASG13D

Protein-protein-interaction networks (PPINs) organize fundamental biological processes, but how oncogenic mutations impact these interactions and their functions at a network-level scale is poorly understood. Here, we analyze how a common oncogenic KRAS mutation (KRASG13D) affects PPIN structure and function of the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) network in colorectal cancer (CRC) cells. Mapping >6000 PPIs shows that this network is extensively rewired in cells expressing transforming levels of KRASG13D (mtKRAS). The factors driving PPIN rewiring are multifactorial including changes in protein expression and phosphorylation. Mathematical modelling also suggests that the binding dynamics of low and high affinity KRAS interactors contribute to rewiring. PPIN rewiring substantially alters the composition of protein complexes, signal flow, transcriptional regulation, and cellular phenotype. These changes are validated by targeted and global experimental analysis. Importantly, genetic alterations in the most extensively rewired PPIN nodes occur frequently in CRC and are prognostic of poor patient outcomes.

Using biological networks to integrate, visualize and analyze genomics data

Network biology is a rapidly developing area of biomedical research and reflects the current view that complex phenotypes, such as disease susceptibility, are not the result of single gene mutations that act in isolation but are rather due to the perturbation of a gene’s network context. Understanding the topology of these molecular interaction networks and identifying the molecules that play central roles in their structure and regulation is a key to understanding complex systems. The falling cost of next-generation sequencing is now enabling researchers to routinely catalogue the molecular components of these networks at a genome-wide scale and over a large number of different conditions. In this review, we describe how to use publicly available bioinformatics tools to integrate genome-wide ‘omics’ data into a network of experimentally-supported molecular interactions. In addition, we describe how to visualize and analyze these networks to identify topological features of likely functional relevance, including network hubs, bottlenecks and modules. We show that network biology provides a powerful conceptual approach to integrate and find patterns in genome-wide genomic data but we also discuss the limitations and caveats of these methods, of which researchers adopting these methods must remain aware.

Targets of drugs are generally, and targets of drugs having side effects are specifically good spreaders of human interactome perturbations

Network-based methods are playing an increasingly important role in drug design. Our main question in this paper was whether the efficiency of drug target proteins to spread perturbations in the human interactome is larger if the binding drugs have side effects, as compared to those which have no reported side effects. Our results showed that in general, drug targets were better spreaders of perturbations than non-target proteins, and in particular, targets of drugs with side effects were also better spreaders of perturbations than targets of drugs having no reported side effects in human protein-protein interaction networks. Colorectal cancer-related proteins were good spreaders and had a high centrality, while type 2 diabetes-related proteins showed an average spreading efficiency and had an average centrality in the human interactome. Moreover, the interactome-distance between drug targets and disease-related proteins was higher in diabetes than in colorectal cancer. Our results may help a better understanding of the network position and dynamics of drug targets and disease-related proteins, and may contribute to develop additional, network-based tests to increase the potential safety of drug candidates.