Abstract
As a pathological condition, epilepsy is caused by abnormal neuronal discharge in brain which will temporarily disrupt the cerebral functions. Epilepsy is a chronic disease which occurs in all ages and would seriously affect patients' personal lives. Thus, it is highly required to develop effective medicines or instruments to treat the disease. Identifying epilepsy-related genes is essential in order to understand and treat the disease because the corresponding proteins encoded by the epilepsy-related genes are candidates of the potential drug targets. In this study, a pioneering computational workflow was proposed to predict novel epilepsy-related genes using the random walk with restart (RWR) algorithm. As reported in the literature RWR algorithm often produces a number of false positive genes, and in this study a permutation test and functional association tests were implemented to filter the genes identified by RWR algorithm, which greatly reduce the number of suspected genes and result in only thirty-three novel epilepsy genes. Finally, these novel genes were analyzed based upon some recently published literatures. Our findings implicate that all novel genes were closely related to epilepsy. It is believed that the proposed workflow can also be applied to identify genes related to other diseases and deepen our understanding of the mechanisms of these diseases.
Highlights
As a classical neurological condition that may suddenly interrupt normal life activities and result in physical injury, epilepsy has been widely used to describe a group of epileptic seizure associated diseases [1, 2]
Considering that epileptic seizures induced by disruption of electrical communications between neurons are the typical symptoms of epilepsy, the long-term paroxysmal epileptic seizures might suggest the initiation and progression of such neurological disease [7, 8]
Previous experiments have confirmed that typical family history and multiple medical conditions may lead to neurological abnormalities, BioMed Research International which may contribute to the initiation and progression of epilepsy [11,12,13]
Summary
As a classical neurological condition that may suddenly interrupt normal life activities and result in physical injury, epilepsy has been widely used to describe a group of epileptic seizure associated diseases [1, 2]. Epileptic seizures are the typical symptoms of the disease, which is the consequence of a disruption of the electrical communications between neurons [3]. Considering that epileptic seizures induced by disruption of electrical communications between neurons are the typical symptoms of epilepsy, the long-term paroxysmal epileptic seizures might suggest the initiation and progression of such neurological disease [7, 8]. Previous experiments have confirmed that typical family history and multiple medical conditions may lead to neurological abnormalities, BioMed Research International which may contribute to the initiation and progression of epilepsy [11,12,13]. As we have mentioned above, epilepsy is referred to as a group of neurological diseases induced by abnormal electrical communication between neurons [4]. Apart from EGG, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), positron emission tomography (PET), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have been widely used to diagnose epilepsy [16,17,18]
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