An integrative model for the identification of key players of cancer networks

Abstract

Uncovering miscoordination in a biological network is essential for the understanding of cellular malfunctions in cancer. Integrative analysis across multiple cellular levels may provide an opportunity to elucidate the miscoordination between the regulatory mechanisms in cancer cells. Here, we propose an integrative model for the identification of key players of the cancer-activated Multi-Type Interaction (MTI) gene network (KPOCN). To measure the functional associations between genes, using DNA copy number aberrations (CNAs) and gene expressions (GEs), we constructed three interacting weighted graphs: GEs affected by CNAs, CNAs by CNAs, and GEs by GEs. These three weighted graphs were mapped onto a single graph, in order to construct a MTI gene network by using their optimal combination. Finally, the effect of a single gene was determined by using the centrality and betweenness of node scores in the MTI network. We first tested KPOCN using simulated datasets, and afterward, we applied this model to the real breast cancer datasets. KPOCN was shown to identify successfully key regulators with their corresponding response variables (targets) when using the simulated data, and identified well-known breast cancer oncogenes. These results demonstrated that our model can be used for an efficient identification of key genes that affect cancer development. Source codes are available at http://gcancer.org/KPOCN. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.