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. 2018 Sep 12;13(9):e0203871.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0203871. eCollection 2018.

A novel method of using Deep Belief Networks and genetic perturbation data to search for yeast signaling pathways

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A novel method of using Deep Belief Networks and genetic perturbation data to search for yeast signaling pathways

Songjian Lu et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Perturbing a signaling system with a serial of single gene deletions and then observing corresponding expression changes in model organisms, such as yeast, is an important and widely used experimental technique for studying signaling pathways. People have developed different computational methods to analyze the perturbation data from gene deletion experiments for exploring the signaling pathways. The most popular methods/techniques include K-means clustering and hierarchical clustering techniques, or combining the expression data with knowledge, such as protein-protein interactions (PPIs) or gene ontology (GO), to search for new pathways. However, these methods neither consider nor fully utilize the intrinsic relation between the perturbation of a pathway and expression changes of genes regulated by the pathway, which served as the main motivation for developing a new computational method in this study. In our new model, we first find gene transcriptomic modules such that genes in each module are highly likely to be regulated by a common signal. We then use the expression status of those modules as readouts of pathway perturbations to search for up-stream pathways. Systematic evaluation, such as through gene ontology enrichment analysis, has provided evidence that genes in each transcriptomic module are highly likely to be regulated by a common signal. The PPI density analysis and literature search revealed that our new perturbation modules are functionally coherent. For example, the literature search revealed that 9 genes in one of our perturbation module are related to cell cycle and all 10 genes in another perturbation module are related by DNA damage, with much evidence from the literature coming from in vitro or/and in vivo verifications. Hence, utilizing the intrinsic relation between the perturbation of a pathway and the expression changes of genes regulated by the pathway is a useful method of searching for signaling pathways using genetic perturbation data. This model would also be suitable for analyzing drug experiment data, such as the CMap data, for finding drugs that perturb the same pathways.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Numbers of hidden nodes that were set and actually activated in all hidden layers.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Comparing the TF enrichment analysis of genes regulated by the first layer hidden nodes with different activation numbers.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Comparing the GO enrichment analysis of genes regulated by the first layer hidden nodes with different activation numbers.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Comparing the PPI density of genes in perturbation modules obtained from different methods.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Comparing the GO enrichment analysis of genes in perturbation modules obtained using different methods.
Fig 6
Fig 6. Protein-protein interaction subnetwork of genes in the perturbation module-30.
Fig 7
Fig 7. Protein-protein interaction subnetwork of genes in the perturbation module-80.

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