"Efficient alpha-beta-motif finder for identification of phenotype-related functional modules"
Abstract: Microbial communities in their natural environments exhibit phenotypes that can directly cause particular diseases, convert biomass or wastewater to energy, or degrade various environmental contaminants. Understanding how these communities realize specific phenotypic traits (e.g., carbon fixation, hydrogen production) is critical for addressing health, bioremediation, or bioenergy problems. In this paper, we describe a graph-theoretical method for in silico prediction of the cellular subsystems that are related to the expression of a target phenotype. The proposed (alpha,beta)-motif finder approach allows for identification of these phenotype-related subsystems that, in addition to metabolic subsystems, could include their regulators, sensors, transporters, and even uncharacterized proteins. By comparing dozens of genome-scale networks of functionally associated proteins, our method efficiently identifies those statistically significant functional modules that are in at least alpha networks of phenotype-expressing organisms but appear in no more than beta networks of organisms that do not exhibit the target phenotype. It has been shown via various experiments that the enumerated modules are indeed related to phenotype-expression when tested with different target phenotypes like hydrogen production, motility, aerobic respiration, and acid-tolerance. Thus, we have proposed a methodology that can identify potential statistically significant phenotype-related functional modules. The functional module is modeled as an (alpha,beta)-clique, where alpha and beta are two criteria introduced in this work. We also propose a novel network model, called the two-typed, divided network. The new network model and the criteria make the problem tractable even while very large networks are being compared.[pdf]
Authors Matthew C. Schmidt, Andrea M Rocha, Kanchana Padmanabhan, Zhengzhang Chen, Kathleen Scott, James R Mihelcic, Nagiza F Samatova
Acknowledgement This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (Expeditions in Computing). The work by A.M.R. was supported by the Delores Auzenne Fellowship and the Alfred P. Sloan Minority PhD Scholarship Program. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle for the LLC U.S. D.O.E. under contract no. DEAC05-00OR22725. This work was also supported by NSF Expeditions in Computing.
Citation
Main software
Author: Matthew C. Schmidt
Download link: Alpha-Beta-Motif-Finder
For more information contact: Dr. Nagiza Samatova - samatova@csc.ncsu.edu