SCS Colloquium: Identification of neighborhoods in disease networks

Speaker : Joerg Menche (Barabasi Lab, Center for Complex Network Research Northeastern University, Boston) 

Abstract: Recent advances in the emerging field of network medicine show that many diseases do not affect isolated parts of the complex cellular networks, but rather perturb entire regions. The systematic identification of such regions is an essential step towards a general understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype. 

In this work we propose a theoretical framework to identify the network neighborhood around a given set of known disease genes, so that the genes within that neighborhood are particularly likely to be disease genes as well or particularly strongly affected by the adjacent disease genes. 

 Our method is based on the iterative expansion of a set of seed nodes by agglomerating nodes which have a significant number of connections to the seed nodes. We show that this process can be regarded as a generalized model of cascading contagion. We discuss the general properties of the process and show how it can be applied to disease networks.