Poster Sessions

BIOINFO-8

Yoo-Ah Kim

Y. Kim, S. Wuchty, T. Przytycka

Identifying Dysregulated Pathways and Controlling Loci in Glioma

In complex diseases, such as cancer, different molecular-level perturbations of the cellular system often lead to what is considered to be the same disease. That is, although individual genetic perturbations are different, they end up dysregulating the same pathway of the cellular system. Furthermore, complex diseases are typically caused by a combination of various factors and that combination might be different in different patients. In this study, we aim to develop computational methods to indentify the pathways that are dysregulated and the direct causes of the dysregulation in individual patients or patient groups. Considering all possible combinations is computationally expensive and at the same time suffers from small statistical power due to multiple testing issues. On the other hand, a solution that considers such factors individually is also problematic since the signal may be too weak. We suggest efficient yet powerful graph theoretic algorithms to identify dysreulated pathways and controlling loci. We use here the term “pathway” in a general sense meaning a group of genes that are related via diverse types of interactions. We applied our methods to a Glioma study with copy number alterations as causal factors.