Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on June 19, 2009
Bioinformatics 2009 25(17):2229-2235; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp375
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Reconstructing signaling pathways from RNAi data using probabilistic Boolean threshold networks
1 Viroquant Research Group Modeling, University of Heidelberg, Bioquant BQ26, Im Neuenheimer Feld 267 and 2 Medical Faculty, Department of Molecular Virology, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 345, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
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Abstract |
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Motivation: The reconstruction of signaling pathways from gene knockdown data is a novel research field enabled by developments in RNAi screening technology. However, while RNA interference is a powerful technique to identify genes related to a phenotype of interest, their placement in the corresponding pathways remains a challenging problem. Difficulties are aggravated if not all pathway components can be observed after each knockdown, but readouts are only available for a small subset. We are then facing the problem of reconstructing a network from incomplete data.
Results: We infer pathway topologies from gene knockdown data using Bayesian networks with probabilistic Boolean threshold functions. To deal with the problem of underdetermined network parameters, we employ a Bayesian learning approach, in which we can integrate arbitrary prior information on the network under consideration. Missing observations are integrated out. We compute the exact likelihood function for smaller networks, and use an approximation to evaluate the likelihood for larger networks. The posterior distribution is evaluated using mode hopping Markov chain Monte Carlo. Distributions over topologies and parameters can then be used to design additional experiments. We evaluate our approach on a small artificial dataset, and present inference results on RNAi data from the Jak/Stat pathway in a human hepatoma cell line.
Availability: Software is available on request.
Contact: lars.kaderali{at}bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Present address: Faculty of Applied Science University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Received on January 29, 2009; revised on May 6, 2009; accepted on June 9, 2009
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