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Corbi: a new R package for biological network alignment and querying.

ABSTRACT: In the last decade, plenty of biological networks are built from the large scale experimental data produced by the rapidly developing high-throughput techniques as well as literature and other sources. But the huge amount of network data have not been fully utilized due to the limited biological network analysis tools. As a basic and essential bioinformatics method, biological network alignment and querying have been applied in many fields such as predicting new protein-protein interactions (PPI). Although many algorithms were published, the network alignment and querying problems are not solved satisfactorily. In this paper, we extended CNetQ, a novel network querying method based on the conditional random fields model, to solve network alignment problem, by adopting an iterative bi-directional mapping strategy. The new method, called CNetA, was compared with other four methods on fifty simulated and three real PPI network alignment instances by using four structural and five biological measures. The computational experiments on the simulated data, which were generated from a biological network evolutionary model to validate the effectiveness of network alignment methods, show that CNetA gets the best accuracy in terms of both nodes and networks. For the real data, larger biological conserved subnetworks and larger connected subnetworks were identified, compared with the structural-dominated methods and the biological-dominated methods, respectively, which suggests that CNetA can better balances the biological and structural similarities. Further, CNetQ and CNetA have been implemented in a new R package Corbi (http://doc.aporc.org/wiki/Corbi), and freely accessible and easy used web services for CNetQ and CNetA have also been constructed based on the R package. The simulated and real datasets used in this paper are available for downloading at http://doc.aporc.org/wiki/CNetA/.

SUBMITTER: Huang Q

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3851956 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Functional modules in biological networks consist of numerous biomolecules and their complicated interactions. Recent studies have shown that biomolecules in a functional module tend to have similar interaction patterns and that such modules are often conserved across biological networks of different species. As a result, such conserved functional modules can be identified through comparative analysis of biological networks. RESULTS:In this work, we propose a novel network querying algorithm based on the CUFID (Comparative network analysis Using the steady-state network Flow to IDentify orthologous proteins) framework combined with an efficient seed-and-extension approach. The proposed algorithm, CUFID-query, can accurately detect conserved functional modules as small subnetworks in the target network that are expected to perform similar functions to the given query functional module. The CUFID framework was recently developed for probabilistic pairwise global comparison of biological networks, and it has been applied to pairwise global network alignment, where the framework was shown to yield accurate network alignment results. In the proposed CUFID-query algorithm, we adopt the CUFID framework and extend it for local network alignment, specifically to solve network querying problems. First, in the seed selection phase, the proposed method utilizes the CUFID framework to compare the query and the target networks and to predict the probabilistic node-to-node correspondence between the networks. Next, the algorithm selects and greedily extends the seed in the target network by iteratively adding nodes that have frequent interactions with other nodes in the seed network, in a way that the conductance of the extended network is maximally reduced. Finally, CUFID-query removes irrelevant nodes from the querying results based on the personalized PageRank vector for the induced network that includes the fully extended network and its neighboring nodes. CONCLUSIONS:Through extensive performance evaluation based on biological networks with known functional modules, we show that CUFID-query outperforms the existing state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy and biological significance of the predictions.

Project description:BACKGROUND: Searching for structural motifs across known protein structures can be useful for identifying unrelated proteins with similar function and characterising secondary structures such as ?-sheets. This is infeasible using conventional sequence alignment because linear protein sequences do not contain spatial information. ?-residue motifs are ?-sheet substructures that can be represented as graphs and queried using existing graph indexing methods, however, these approaches are designed for general graphs that do not incorporate the inherent structural constraints of ?-sheets and require computationally-expensive filtering and verification procedures. 3D substructure search methods, on the other hand, allow ?-residue motifs to be queried in a three-dimensional context but at significant computational costs. FINDINGS: We developed a new method for querying ?-residue motifs, called BetaSearch, which leverages the natural planar constraints of ?-sheets by indexing them as 2D matrices, thus avoiding much of the computational complexities involved with structural and graph querying. BetaSearch exhibits faster filtering, verification, and overall query time than existing graph indexing approaches whilst producing comparable index sizes. Compared to 3D substructure search methods, BetaSearch achieves 33 and 240 times speedups over index-based and pairwise alignment-based approaches, respectively. Furthermore, we have presented case-studies to demonstrate its capability of motif matching in sequentially dissimilar proteins and described a method for using BetaSearch to predict ?-strand pairing. CONCLUSIONS: We have demonstrated that BetaSearch is a fast method for querying substructure motifs. The improvements in speed over existing approaches make it useful for efficiently performing high-volume exploratory querying of possible protein substructural motifs or conformations. BetaSearch was used to identify a nearly identical ?-residue motif between an entirely synthetic (Top7) and a naturally-occurring protein (Charcot-Leyden crystal protein), as well as identifying structural similarities between biotin-binding domains of avidin, streptavidin and the lipocalin gamma subunit of human C8.

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Corbi: a new R package for biological network alignment and querying.

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