title: Identifying dysfunctional crosstalk of pathways in various regions of Alzheimer's disease brains.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major neurodegenerative disorder leading to amnesia, cognitive impairment and dementia in the elderly. Usually this type of lesions results from dysfunctional protein cooperations in the biological pathways. In addition, AD progression is known to occur in different brain regions with particular features. Thus identification and analysis of crosstalk among dysregulated pathways as well as identification of their clusters in various diseased brain regions are expected to provide deep insights into the pathogenetic mechanism.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here we propose a network-based systems biology approach to detect the crosstalks among AD related pathways, as well as their dysfunctions in the six brain regions of AD patients. Through constructing a network of pathways, the relationships among AD pathway and its neighbor pathways are systematically investigated and visually presented by their intersections. We found that the significance degree of pathways related to the fatal disorders and the pathway overlapping strength can indicate the impacts of these neighbored pathways to AD development. Furthermore, the crosstalks among pathways reveal some evidence that the neighbor pathways of AD pathway closely cooperate and play important tasks in the AD progression.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our study identifies the common and distinct features of the dysfunctional crosstalk of pathways in various AD brain regions. The global pathway crosstalk network and the clusters of relevant pathways of AD provide evidence of cooperativity among pathways for potential pathogenesis of the neuron complex disease.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Systems Biology and SIBS-Novo Nordisk Translational Research Centre for PreDiabetes, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China. zpliu@sibs.ac.cn
authors.forename: Zhi-Ping
authors.initials: ZP
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xiang-Sun
authors.initials: XS
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Luonan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000235:genetics / Q000473:pathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D018450:Disease Progression; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D006801:Humans; D020239:Receptor Cross-Talk; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*