Employing publically available biological expert knowledge from protein-protein interaction information

Abstract

Genome wide association studies (GWAS) are now allowing researchers to probe the depths of common complex human diseases, yet few have identified single sequence variants that confer disease susceptibility. As hypothesized, this is due the fact that multiple interacting factors influence clinical endpoint. Given the number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) combinations grows exponentially with the number of SNPs being analyzed, computational methods designed to detect these interactions in smaller datasets are thus not applicable. Providing statistical expert knowledge has exhibited an improvement in their performance, and we believe biological expert knowledge to be as capable. Since one of the strongest demonstrations of the functional relationship between genes is protein-protein interactions, we present a method that exploits this information in genetic analyses. This study provides a step towards utilizing expert knowledge derived from public biological sources to assist computational intelligence algorithms in the search for epistasis. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.