Abstract
Uveitis is the inflammation of the uvea and is a serious eye disease that can cause blindness for middle-aged and young people. However, the pathogenesis of this disease has not been fully uncovered and thus renders difficulties in designing effective treatments. Completely identifying the genes related to this disease can help improve and accelerate the comprehension of uveitis. In this study, a new computational method was developed to infer potential related genes based on validated ones. We employed a large protein–protein interaction network reported in STRING, in which Laplacian heat diffusion algorithm was applied using validated genes as seed nodes. Except for the validated ones, all genes in the network were filtered by three tests, namely, permutation, association, and function tests, which evaluated the genes based on their specialties and associations to uveitis. Results indicated that 59 inferred genes were accessed, several of which were confirmed to be highly related to uveitis by literature review. In addition, the inferred genes were compared with those reported in a previous study, indicating that our reported genes are necessary supplements.
Highlights
Uvea is a specific structure in the eyes and consists of the pigmented layer and the outer fibrous layer (Junqueira et al, 2013; Rekas et al, 2015)
Proteins encoded by the 121 uveitis-related genes were obtained and further mapped onto their Ensembl IDs because we adopted the protein–protein interaction (PPI) network to infer novel uveitis related genes based on these genes
We set up a computation method to infer novel uveitis-related genes based on validated ones retrieved from published literature
Summary
Uvea is a specific structure in the eyes and consists of the pigmented layer and the outer fibrous layer (Junqueira et al, 2013; Rekas et al, 2015). As one of the most common types of inflammation in uvea, uveitis is the third leading cause of blindness in all developed countries, generally affecting people aging 20–50 years (Junqueira et al, 2013). According to the statistics from the National Eye Institute in the United States, uveitis can be subtyped as anterior uveitis, intermediate uveitis, posterior uveitis, and panuveitis uveitis based on different pathogenic progressions and sites (Lim et al, 2016). Uvea contains most of the eye’s blood vessels, from which immune cells can enter the eye. Uvea gets inflamed easier than other eye tissue regions, revealing the histological causes of uveitis’ high morbidity rate
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