Reconstructing neuronal signaling pathways with the potential for disruption in schizophrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the population. It is poorly characterized. A pathway model of disruption offers a good tool to observe network-wide disruptions. Here, we use PathLinker to link hand-curated receptors and transcription factors, and combine the resulting networks into metanetworks. Topologically, schizophrenia pathways were found to not have significantly more node overlap than a random sampling, but were found to have significantly more edge overlap (p = 0.0661, p < 0.0001). PathLinker reconstructed well-known signaling proteins, proteins known to be associated with schizophrenia, and neuronal proteins not previously studied in a schizophrenia context.