This article is part of the supplement: Proceedings of the Sixth Annual MCBIOS Conference. Transformational Bioinformatics: Delivering Value from Genomes
Proceedings
Graph ranking for exploratory gene data analysis
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* Corresponding author: Xin Dang xdang@olemiss.edu
1 Department of Mathematics, The University of Mississippi, University, MS, 38677, USA
2 Computer & Information Science Department, The University of Mississippi, University, MS, 38677, USA
BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 11):S19 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-S11-S19
Published: 8 October 2009Abstract
Background
Microarray technology has made it possible to simultaneously monitor the expression levels of thousands of genes in a single experiment. However, the large number of genes greatly increases the challenges of analyzing, comprehending and interpreting the resulting mass of data. Selecting a subset of important genes is inevitable to address the challenge. Gene selection has been investigated extensively over the last decade. Most selection procedures, however, are not sufficient for accurate inference of underlying biology, because biological significance does not necessarily have to be statistically significant. Additional biological knowledge needs to be integrated into the gene selection procedure.
Results
We propose a general framework for gene ranking. We construct a bipartite graph from the Gene Ontology (GO) and gene expression data. The graph describes the relationship between genes and their associated molecular functions. Under a species condition, edge weights of the graph are assigned to be gene expression level. Such a graph provides a mathematical means to represent both species-independent and species-dependent biological information. We also develop a new ranking algorithm to analyze the weighted graph via a kernelized spatial depth (KSD) approach. Consequently, the importance of gene and molecular function can be simultaneously ranked by a real-valued measure, KSD, which incorporates the global and local structure of the graph. Over-expressed and under-regulated genes also can be separately ranked.
Conclusion
The gene-function bigraph integrates molecular function annotations into gene expression data. The relevance of genes is described in the graph (through a common function). The proposed method provides an exploratory framework for gene data analysis.