Title: Predicting altered pathways using extendable scaffolds

Authors: B.M. Broom, T.J. McDonnell, D. Subramanian

Addresses: Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Blvd, Houston TX 77030, USA. ' Department of Molecular Pathology and General Medical Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Blvd, Houston TX 77030, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 6100 Main St, Houston TX 77005, USA

Abstract: Many diseases, especially solid tumors, involve the disruption or deregulation of cellular processes. Most current work using gene expression and other high-throughput data, simply list a set of differentially expressed genes. We propose a new method, PAPES (predicting altered pathways using extendable scaffolds), to computationally reverse-engineer models of biological systems. We use sets of genes that occur in a known biological pathway to construct component process models. We then compose these models to build larger scale networks that capture interactions among pathways. We show that we can learn process modifications in two coupled metabolic pathways in prostate cancer cells.

Keywords: Bayesian networks; gene expression; data analysis; prostate cancer; glutathione pathway; urea cycle; bioinformatics; altered pathways; extendable scaffolds; reverse engineering; biological systems; metabolic pathways; process modifications; machine learning; component models.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2006.009190

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2006 Vol.2 No.1, pp.3 - 18

Published online: 09 Mar 2006 *

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