Computational analysis of the synergy among multiple interacting genes.
Diseases such as cancer are often related to collaborative effects involving interactions of multiple genes within complex pathways, or to combinations of multiple SNPs. To understand the structure of such mechanisms, it is helpful to analyze genes in terms of the purely cooperative, as opposed to independent, nature of their contributions towards a phenotype. Here, we present an information-theoretic analysis that provides a quantitative measure of the multivariate synergy and decomposes sets of genes into submodules each of which contains synergistically interacting genes. When the resulting computational tools are used for the analysis of gene expression or SNP data, this systems-based methodology provides insight into the biological mechanisms responsible for disease.
Anastassiou
Dimitris
D
Department of Electrical Engineering, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA. anastas@ee.columbia.edu
D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D053263:Gene Regulatory Networks; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease; D006801:Humans; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide