Abstract
Background in spite of the increasing availability of genomic and transcriptomic data, there is still a gap between the detection of perturbations in gene expression and the understanding of their contribution to the molecular mechanisms that ultimately account for the phenotype studied. Alterations in the metabolism are behind the initiation and progression of many diseases, including cancer. The wealth of available knowledge on metabolic processes can therefore be used to derive mechanistic models that link gene expression perturbations to changes in metabolic activity that provide relevant clues on molecular mechanisms of disease and drug modes of action (MoA). In particular, pathway modules, which recapitulate the main aspects of metabolism, are especially suitable for this type of modeling.
Results we present Metabolizer, a web-based application that offers an intuitive, easy-to-use interactive interface to analyze differences in pathway module metabolic activities that can also be used for class prediction and in silico prediction of Knock-Out (KO) effects. Moreover, Metabolizer can automatically predict the optimal KO intervention for restoring a diseased phenotype. We provide different types of validations of some of the predictions made by Metabolizer.
Conclusions Metabolizer is a web tool that allows understanding molecular mechanisms of disease or the MoA of drugs within the context of the metabolism by using gene expression measurements. In addition, this tool automatically suggests potential therapeutic targets for individualized therapeutic interventions.
Metabolizer can be found at: http://metabolizer.babelomics.org.
- List of abbreviations
- AUC
- :Area Under the Curve
- BRCA
- :Breast Invasive Carcinoma
- CBM
- :Constraint Based Models
- TSV
- :Tab-Separated Values
- FDR
- :False Discovery Rate
- GPR
- :Gene-Protein-Reaction
- GSEA
- :Gene Set Enrichment Analysis
- KEGG
- :Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes
- KGML
- :KEGG Markup Language
- KIRC
- :Kidney Renal Clear Cell Carcinoma
- K-M
- :Kaplan-Meier
- KO
- :Knock-Out
- LIHC
- :Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma
- MoA
- :Mode of Action
- PRAD
- :Prostate Adenocarcinoma
- RF
- :Random Forests
- ROC
- :Receiver Operating Characteristic
- SVM
- :Support Vector Machines
- TCGA
- :The Cancer Genome Atlas
- TMM
- :Trimmed Mean of M-values