Cited by 95Bioinformatics and Genomic NetworksGenomics and Rare DiseasesBiomedical Text Mining and Ontologies

Network analysis reveals rare disease signatures across multiple levels of biological organization

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Buphamalai, Pisanu, Kokotovic, Tomislav, Nagy, Vanja, Menche, Jörg·2021·Nature Communications

Abstract

Rare genetic diseases are typically caused by a single gene defect. Despite this clear causal relationship between genotype and phenotype, identifying the pathobiological mechanisms at various levels of biological organization remains a practical and conceptual challenge. Here, we introduce a network approach for evaluating the impact of rare gene defects across biological scales. We construct a multiplex network consisting of over 20 million gene relationships that are organized into 46 network layers spanning six major biological scales between genotype and phenotype. A comprehensive analysis of 3,771 rare diseases reveals distinct phenotypic modules within individual layers. These modules can be exploited to mechanistically dissect the impact of gene defects and accurately predict rare disease gene candidates. Our results show that the disease module formalism can be applied to rare diseases and generalized beyond physical interaction networks. These findings open up new venues to apply network-based tools for cross-scale data integration.

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  • Modeling small compounds and protein targets' molecular structure and binding affinities/specificity using graph representation learning has enabled accelerated investigation of drug-protein target interactions.

    “Modeling small compounds’ and protein targets’ molecular structure as well as their binding affinities and specificity, for instance, using graph representation learning has enabled accelerated investigation of interactions between a given drug and protein target.”

    From Graph representation learning in biomedicine and healthcare (2022) · cites this paper as [170]

  • Shallow network embedding techniques generate embeddings for drugs and targets by computing drug-drug, drug-target, and target-target similarities.

    “Shallow network embedding techniques are also used to generate embeddings for drugs and targets by computing drug-drug, drug-target, and target-target similarities (Section 2.1) [170].”

    From Graph representation learning in biomedicine and healthcare (2022) · cites this paper as [170]

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. [71]Pesquita, C. In The Gene Ontology Handbook (eds. Dessimoz, C. & Škunca, N.) 161–173 (Springer New York, 2017).
  2. [76]Yu, G. In Stem Cell Transcriptional Networks: Methods and Protocols (Kidder, B. L. ed.) 207–215 (Springer US, 2020).
  3. [94]Buphamalai, P. et al. Network analysis reveals rare disease signatures across multiple levels of biological organization. https://github.com/menchelab/MultiOme. 10.5281/zenodo.5562924 (2021). PMC8578255 34753928 · DOI

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Authors
Buphamalai, P., Kokotovic, T., Nagy, V., & Menche, J.
Affiliations
  • University of Vienna (AT)
  • Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT)
Corresponding author
Menche, Jörg
Venue
Nature Communications
Published
2021-11-09
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
6306-6306
ISSN
2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3212549469
Cited by
95
References
100
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 31 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 1
FWCI
3.85
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
Vienna Science and Technology Fund (VRG15-005)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genomics and Rare Diseases
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
Keywords
rare genetic disorders, genotype-phenotype correlation, multiplex networks, biological scales, gene interaction networks
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Genotype, Humans, Models, Biological, Phenotype, Computational Biology, Protein Interaction Mapping, Rare Diseases, Gene Regulatory Networks

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