Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Background
Genome-wide disease-gene finding approaches may sometimes provide us with a long list of candidate genes. Since using pure experimental approaches to verify all candidates could be expensive, a number of network-based methods have been developed to prioritize candidates. Such tools usually have a set of parameters pre-trained using available network data. This means that re-training network-based tools may be required when existing biological networks are updated or when networks from different sources are to be tried.Results
We developed a parameter-free method, interconnectedness (ICN), to rank candidate genes by assessing the closeness of them to known disease genes in a network. ICN was tested using 1,993 known disease-gene associations and achieved a success rate of ~44% using a protein-protein interaction network under a test scenario of simulated linkage analysis. This performance is comparable with those of other well-known methods and ICN outperforms other methods when a candidate disease gene is not directly linked to known disease genes in a network. Interestingly, we show that a combined scoring strategy could enable ICN to achieve an even better performance (~50%) than other methods used alone.Conclusions
ICN, a user-friendly method, can well complement other network-based methods in the context of prioritizing candidate disease genes.
SUBMITTER: Hsu CL
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3333184 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Hsu Chia-Lang CL Huang Yen-Hua YH Hsu Chien-Ting CT Yang Ueng-Cheng UC
BMC genomics 20111130
<h4>Background</h4>Genome-wide disease-gene finding approaches may sometimes provide us with a long list of candidate genes. Since using pure experimental approaches to verify all candidates could be expensive, a number of network-based methods have been developed to prioritize candidates. Such tools usually have a set of parameters pre-trained using available network data. This means that re-training network-based tools may be required when existing biological networks are updated or when netwo ...[more]