An integrated approach to inferring gene–disease associations in humans

Abstract

One of the most important tasks of modern bioinformatics is the development of computational tools that can be used to understand and treat human disease. To date, a variety of methods have been explored and algorithms for candidate gene prioritization are gaining in their usefulness. Here, we propose an algorithm for detecting gene-disease associations based on the human protein-protein interaction network, known gene-disease associations, protein sequence, and protein functional information at the molecular level. Our method, PhenoPred, is supervised: first, we mapped each gene/protein onto the spaces of disease and functional terms based on distance to all annotated proteins in the protein interaction network. We also encoded sequence, function, physicochemical, and predicted structural properties, such as secondary structure and flexibility. We then trained support vector machines to detect gene-disease associations for a number of terms in Disease Ontology and provided evidence that, despite the noise/incompleteness of experimental data and unfinished ontology of diseases, identification of candidate genes can be successful even when a large number of candidate disease terms are predicted on simultaneously. www.phenopred.org.