Chapter 8 - Host–pathogen protein–protein interaction network for Candida albican pathogenesis and zebrafish redox process through dynamic interspecies interaction model and two-sided genome-wide microarray data

Abstract

In the last decades, despite clinical research and development, infectious diseases remain a top global problem in public health today, being responsible for millions of morbidities and mortalities each year. Consequently, many studies have sought to investigate host–pathogen interactions from various viewpoints in attempts to understand pathogenic and defensive mechanisms during the infectious process, which could help control pathogenic infections. However, most of these efforts have focused predominately on the host or the pathogen individually rather than on a simultaneous analysis of both interaction partners. In this chapter, with the help of simultaneously quantified time-course Candida albicans–zebrafish interaction transcriptomics and other omics data, a computational framework was developed to construct the interspecies protein–protein interaction (PPI) network for C. albicans–zebrafish interactions based on the inference of ortholog-based PPIs and the dynamic modeling of PPIs. The identified C. albicans–zebrafish interspecies PPI network could highlight the interspecies association between C. albicans pathogenesis and the zebrafish redox process, indicating that redox status is critical in the battle between the host and pathogen. Advancing from the single-species network construction method, the interspecies PPI network construction approach allows further characterization and elucidation of the host–pathogen interactions during infection. With the continued accumulation of interspecies transcriptomics data, the proposed method could be used to explore progressive host/pathogen network rewiring over time, which could benefit the development of systems medicine for infectious diseases.