Identifying disease feature genes based on cellular localized gene functional modules and regulation networks

Abstract

Identifying disease-relevant genes and functional modules, based on gene expression profiles and gene functional knowledge, is of high importance for studying disease mechanisms and subtyping disease phenotypes. Using gene categories of biological process and cellular component in Gene Ontology, we propose an approach to selecting functional modules enriched with differentially expressed genes, and identifying the feature functional modules of high disease discriminating abilities. Using the differentially expressed genes in each feature module as the feature genes, we reveal the relevance of the modules to the studied diseases. Using three data-sets for prostate cancer, gastric cancer, and leukemia, we have demonstrated that the proposed modular approach is of high power in identifying functionally integrated feature gene subsets that are highly relevant to the disease mechanisms. Our analysis has also shown that the critical disease-relevant genes might be better recognized from the gene regulation network, which is constructed using the characterized functional modules, giving important clues to the concerted mechanisms of the modules responding to complex disease states. In addition, the proposed approach to selecting the disease-relevant genes by jointly considering the gene functional knowledge suggests a new way for precisely classifying disease samples with clear biological interpretations, which is critical for the clinical diagnosis and the elucidation of the pathogenic basis of complex diseases.