Zaynab Mousavian1, Mehran Khodabandeh2, Ali Sharifi-Zarchi3,4, Alireza Nadafian5, Alireza Mahmoudi5. 1. Department of Computer Science, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. zmousavian@ut.ac.ir. 2. School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 3. Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. 4. Department of Stem cells and Developmental Biology at the Cell Science Research Center, Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology, ACECR, Tehran, Iran. 5. Department of Computer Science, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: StrongestPath is a Cytoscape 3 application that enables the analysis of interactions between two proteins or groups of proteins in a collection of protein-protein interaction (PPI) network or signaling network databases. When there are different levels of confidence over the interactions, the application is able to process them and identify the cascade of interactions with the highest total confidence score. Given a set of proteins, StrongestPath can extract a set of possible interactions between the input proteins, and expand the network by adding new proteins that have the most interactions with highest total confidence to the current network of proteins. The application can also identify any activating or inhibitory regulatory paths between two distinct sets of transcription factors and target genes. This application can be used on the built-in human and mouse PPI or signaling databases, or any user-provided database for some organism. RESULTS: Our results on 12 signaling pathways from the NetPath database demonstrate that the application can be used for indicating proteins which may play significant roles in a pathway by finding the strongest path(s) in the PPI or signaling network. CONCLUSION: Easy access to multiple public large databases, generating output in a short time, addressing some key challenges in one platform, and providing a user-friendly graphical interface make StrongestPath an extremely useful application.
BACKGROUND: StrongestPath is a Cytoscape 3 application that enables the analysis of interactions between two proteins or groups of proteins in a collection of protein-protein interaction (PPI) network or signaling network databases. When there are different levels of confidence over the interactions, the application is able to process them and identify the cascade of interactions with the highest total confidence score. Given a set of proteins, StrongestPath can extract a set of possible interactions between the input proteins, and expand the network by adding new proteins that have the most interactions with highest total confidence to the current network of proteins. The application can also identify any activating or inhibitory regulatory paths between two distinct sets of transcription factors and target genes. This application can be used on the built-in human and mouse PPI or signaling databases, or any user-provided database for some organism. RESULTS: Our results on 12 signaling pathways from the NetPath database demonstrate that the application can be used for indicating proteins which may play significant roles in a pathway by finding the strongest path(s) in the PPI or signaling network. CONCLUSION: Easy access to multiple public large databases, generating output in a short time, addressing some key challenges in one platform, and providing a user-friendly graphical interface make StrongestPath an extremely useful application.
Authors: David Croft; Gavin O'Kelly; Guanming Wu; Robin Haw; Marc Gillespie; Lisa Matthews; Michael Caudy; Phani Garapati; Gopal Gopinath; Bijay Jassal; Steven Jupe; Irina Kalatskaya; Shahana Mahajan; Bruce May; Nelson Ndegwa; Esther Schmidt; Veronica Shamovsky; Christina Yung; Ewan Birney; Henning Hermjakob; Peter D'Eustachio; Lincoln Stein Journal: Nucleic Acids Res Date: 2010-11-09 Impact factor: 16.971
Authors: Tanya Barrett; Dennis B Troup; Stephen E Wilhite; Pierre Ledoux; Dmitry Rudnev; Carlos Evangelista; Irene F Kim; Alexandra Soboleva; Maxim Tomashevsky; Ron Edgar Journal: Nucleic Acids Res Date: 2006-11-11 Impact factor: 16.971