Sorin Draghici, Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mi, USA

A novel systems biology approach for the analysis of signaling pathways

A common challenge in the analysis of genomics data is trying to understand the underlying phenomenon in the context of all complex interactions taking place on various signaling pathways. A statistical approach using various models is universally used to identify the most relevant pathways in a given experiment. Here we show that the existing pathway analysis methods fail to take into consideration important biological aspects and may provide incorrect results in certain situations. Using a systems biology approach, we developed an impact analysis that includes the classical statistics, but also considers other crucial factors such as the magnitude of each gene's expression change, their type and position in the given pathways, their interactions, etc. The impact analysis is an attempt to a deeper level of statistical analysis, informed by more pathway-specific biology than the existing techniques. On several illustrative data sets, the classical analysis produces both false positives and false negatives while the impact analysis provides biologically meaningful results. This analysis method has been implemented as a web-based tool, Pathway-Express, freely available as part of the Onto-Tools (http://vortex.cs.wayne.edu).

Biosketch

Sorin Draghici is associate professor and Director of the Intelligent Systems and Bioinformatics Laboratory at the Department of Computer Science of Wayne State University. Sorin Draghici has obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from "Politehnica" University in Bucharest, Romania, followed by a Ph.D. degree from the University of St-Andrews., U.K.
He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications as well as 8 book chapters. He has also authored the monograph “Data Analysis Tools for DNA Microarrays”, published by CRC Press/ Chapman and Hall in a first print in 2003, followed by a second revised print in 2005 and soon to be followed by a new edition in January 2010. He is co-inventor on 4 patent applications in the field of bioinformatics. His research group developed several bioinformatics data analysis software tools that are currently used by over 10000 researchers around the world.