Mathäus Dejori | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Mining functional modules in genetic networks with decomposable graphical models.

In recent years, graphical models have become an increasingly important tool for the structural analysis of genome-wide expression profiles at the systems level. Here we present a new graphical modelling technique, which is based on decomposable graphical models, and apply it to a set of gene expression profiles from acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The new method explains probabilistic dependencies of expression levels in terms of the concerted action of underlying genetic functional modules, which are represented as so-called "cliques" in the graph. In addition, the method uses continuous-valued (instead of discretized) expression levels, and makes no particular assumption about their probability distribution. We show that the method successfully groups members of known functional modules to cliques. Our method allows the evaluation of the importance of genes for global cellular functions based on both link count and the clique membership count.

Gene Expression Profiling↗

PubMed2004

Identifying interventional and pathogenic mechanisms by generative inverse modeling of gene expression profiles.

MOTIVATION: The characterization of genetic mechanisms underlying normal cellular function, cancer development, pathogenesis, and the effect of drug treatment is one of the most challenging topics for cancer research and molecular biology. Existing methods for inferring genetic regulatory networks from genome-wide expression profiles provide important information about gene interactions and regulatory relationships. However, these methods do not provide information about the impact of possible interventions or changes on such regulatory networks to study cause-effect relationships at a systems-biology level. RESULTS: We present a data-driven method called generative inverse modeling, which simulates the effect of local genetic changes on the global cellular state, as reflected by an altered genome-wide expression profile. For each genetic change we define a pathogenic score by calculating to what extent it transforms the simulated expression patterns into patterns measured for pathologically altered tissues. The method can be used to estimate the relevance of genes for disease-specific genetic mechanisms, e.g., as presented here for pathogenesis. Generative inverse modeling is based on a Bayesian probability density estimation from a set of measured gene-expression patterns.

Computational Biology↗