Cancer networks and beyond: interpreting mutations using the human interactome and protein structure.

Over recent years, with the advances in next-generation sequencing, a large number of cancer mutations have been identified and accumulated in public repositories. Coupled to this is our increased ability to generate detailed interactome maps that help to enrich our knowledge of the biological implications of cancer mutations. As a result, network analysis approaches have become an invaluable tool to predict and interpret mutations that are associated with tumour survival and progression. Our understanding of cancer mechanisms is further enhanced by mapping protein structure information to such networks. Here we review the current methodologies for annotating the functional impacts of cancer mutations, which range from analysis of protein structures to protein-protein interaction network studies.

A structural systems biology approach for quantifying the systemic consequences of missense mutations in proteins.

Gauging the systemic effects of non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) is an important topic in the pursuit of personalized medicine. However, it is a non-trivial task to understand how a change at the protein structure level eventually affects a cell's behavior. This is because complex information at both the protein and pathway level has to be integrated. Given that the idea of integrating both protein and pathway dynamics to estimate the systemic impact of missense mutations in proteins remains predominantly unexplored, we investigate the practicality of such an approach by formulating mathematical models and comparing them with experimental data to study missense mutations. We present two case studies: (1) interpreting systemic perturbation for mutations within the cell cycle control mechanisms (G2 to mitosis transition) for yeast; (2) phenotypic classification of neuron-related human diseases associated with mutations within the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. We show that the application of simplified mathematical models is feasible for understanding the effects of small sequence changes on cellular behavior. Furthermore, we show that the systemic impact of missense mutations can be effectively quantified as a combination of protein stability change and pathway perturbation.

Identification of targeted analyte clusters for studies of schizophrenia.

The search for biomarkers to diagnose psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia has been underway for decades. Many molecular profiling studies in this field have focused on identifying individual marker signals that show significant differences in expression between patients and the normal population. However, signals for multiple analyte combinations that exhibit patterned behaviors have been less exploited. Here, we present a novel approach for identifying biomarkers of schizophrenia using expression of serum analytes from first onset, drug-naïve patients and normal controls. The strength of patterned signals was amplified by analyzing data in reproducing kernel spaces. This resulted in the identification of small sets of analytes referred to as targeted clusters that have discriminative power specifically for schizophrenia in both human and rat models. These clusters were associated with specific molecular signaling pathways and less strongly related to other neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. These results shed new light concerning how complex neuropsychiatric diseases behave at the pathway level and demonstrate the power of this approach in identification of disease-specific biomarkers and potential novel therapeutic strategies.

Prediction by graph theoretic measures of structural effects in proteins arising from non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms.

Recent analyses of human genome sequences have given rise to impressive advances in identifying non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs). By contrast, the annotation of nsSNPs and their links to diseases are progressing at a much slower pace. Many of the current approaches to analysing disease-associated nsSNPs use primarily sequence and evolutionary information, while structural information is relatively less exploited. In order to explore the potential of such information, we developed a structure-based approach, Bongo (Bonds ON Graph), to predict structural effects of nsSNPs. Bongo considers protein structures as residue-residue interaction networks and applies graph theoretical measures to identify the residues that are critical for maintaining structural stability by assessing the consequences on the interaction network of single point mutations. Our results show that Bongo is able to identify mutations that cause both local and global structural effects, with a remarkably low false positive rate. Application of the Bongo method to the prediction of 506 disease-associated nsSNPs resulted in a performance (positive predictive value, PPV, 78.5%) similar to that of PolyPhen (PPV, 77.2%) and PANTHER (PPV, 72.2%). As the Bongo method is solely structure-based, our results indicate that the structural changes resulting from nsSNPs are closely associated to their pathological consequences.

Structural assembly of two-domain proteins by rigid-body docking.

BACKGROUND: Modelling proteins with multiple domains is one of the central challenges in Structural Biology. Although homology modelling has successfully been applied for prediction of protein structures, very often domain-domain interactions cannot be inferred from the structures of homologues and their prediction requires ab initio methods. Here we present a new structural prediction approach for modelling two-domain proteins based on rigid-body domain-domain docking. RESULTS: Here we focus on interacting domain pairs that are part of the same peptide chain and thus have an inter-domain peptide region (so called linker). We have developed a method called pyDockTET (tethered-docking), which uses rigid-body docking to generate domain-domain poses that are further scored by binding energy and a pseudo-energy term based on restraints derived from linker end-to-end distances. The method has been benchmarked on a set of 77 non-redundant pairs of domains with available X-ray structure. We have evaluated the docking method ZDOCK, which is able to generate acceptable domain-domain orientations in 51 out of the 77 cases. Among them, our method pyDockTET finds the correct assembly within the top 10 solutions in over 60% of the cases. As a further test, on a subset of 20 pairs where domains were built by homology modelling, ZDOCK generates acceptable orientations in 13 out of the 20 cases, among which the correct assembly is ranked lower than 10 in around 70% of the cases by our pyDockTET method. CONCLUSION: Our results show that rigid-body docking approach plus energy scoring and linker-based restraints are useful for modelling domain-domain interactions. These positive results will encourage development of new methods for structural prediction of macromolecules with multiple (more than two) domains.

A structural bioinformatics approach to the analysis of nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) and their relation to disease.

The prediction of the effects of nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) on function depends critically on exploiting all information available on the three-dimensional structures of proteins. We describe software and databases for the analysis of nsSNPs that allow a user to move from SNP to sequence to structure to function. In both structure prediction and the analysis of the effects of nsSNPs, we exploit information about protein evolution, in particular, that derived from investigations on the relation of sequence to structure gained from the study of amino acid substitutions in divergent evolution. The techniques developed in our laboratory have allowed fast and automated sequence-structure homology recognition to identify templates and to perform comparative modeling; as well as simple, robust, and generally applicable algorithms to assess the likely impact of amino acid substitutions on structure and interactions. We describe our strategy for approaching the relationship between SNPs and disease, and the results of benchmarking our approach -- human proteins of known structure and recognized mutation.

A simple biophysical model emulates budding yeast chromosome condensation.

Mitotic chromosomes were one of the first cell biological structures to be described, yet their molecular architecture remains poorly understood. We have devised a simple biophysical model of a 300 kb-long nucleosome chain, the size of a budding yeast chromosome, constrained by interactions between binding sites of the chromosomal condensin complex, a key component of interphase and mitotic chromosomes. Comparisons of computational and experimental (4C) interaction maps, and other biophysical features, allow us to predict a mode of condensin action. Stochastic condensin-mediated pairwise interactions along the nucleosome chain generate native-like chromosome features and recapitulate chromosome compaction and individualization during mitotic condensation. Higher order interactions between condensin binding sites explain the data less well. Our results suggest that basic assumptions about chromatin behavior go a long way to explain chromosome architecture and are able to generate a molecular model of what the inside of a chromosome is likely to look like.

The genomic and phenotypic diversity of Schizosaccharomyces pombe.

Natural variation within species reveals aspects of genome evolution and function. The fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe is an important model for eukaryotic biology, but researchers typically use one standard laboratory strain. To extend the usefulness of this model, we surveyed the genomic and phenotypic variation in 161 natural isolates. We sequenced the genomes of all strains, finding moderate genetic diversity (π = 3 × 10(-3) substitutions/site) and weak global population structure. We estimate that dispersal of S. pombe began during human antiquity (∼340 BCE), and ancestors of these strains reached the Americas at ∼1623 CE. We quantified 74 traits, finding substantial heritable phenotypic diversity. We conducted 223 genome-wide association studies, with 89 traits showing at least one association. The most significant variant for each trait explained 22% of the phenotypic variance on average, with indels having larger effects than SNPs. This analysis represents a rich resource to examine genotype-phenotype relationships in a tractable model.

Understanding cancer mechanisms through network dynamics.

Cancer is a complex, multifaceted disease. Cellular systems are perturbed both during the onset and development of cancer, and the behavioural change of tumour cells usually involves a broad range of dynamic variations. To an extent, the difficulty of monitoring the systemic change has been alleviated by recent developments in the high-throughput technologies. At both the genomic as well as proteomic levels, the technological advances in microarray and mass spectrometry, in conjunction with computational simulations and the construction of human interactome maps have facilitated the progress of identifying disease-associated genes. On a systems level, computational approaches developed for network analysis are becoming especially useful for providing insights into the mechanism behind tumour development and metastasis. This review emphasizes network approaches that have been developed to study cancer and provides an overview of our current knowledge of protein-protein interaction networks, and how their systemic perturbation can be analysed by two popular network simulation methods: Boolean network and ordinary differential equations.

Comparison of peripheral and central schizophrenia biomarker profiles.

We have recently shown that a molecular biomarker signature comprised of inflammatory, hormonal and growth factors occurs in the blood serum from first onset schizophrenia patients. Here, we use the same platform to investigate post mortem brain tissue (Brodmann area 10) from schizophrenia patients who were mainly chronically ill and drug treated. Twenty-one analytes are differentially expressed in post-mortem brain tissue. Comparison with our previous mRNA profiling studies of the same patient samples in another frontal cortical area showed that 9 of these molecules were also altered at the transcriptional level. Furthermore, 9 of the molecules were also altered in serum from living first onset schizophrenia patients compared to controls. We propose a model in which the brain and periphery are coordinated through hormones and other regulatory molecules released into the blood via the diffuse neuroendocrine system. These findings provide further evidence for the systemic nature of schizophrenia and give added validity to the concept that schizophrenia can be investigated through studies of blood-based biomarkers.

Meet me halfway: when genomics meets structural bioinformatics.

The DNA sequencing technology developed by Frederick Sanger in the 1970s established genomics as the basis of comparative genetics. The recent invention of next-generation sequencing (NGS) platform has added a new dimension to genome research by generating ultra-fast and high-throughput sequencing data in an unprecedented manner. The advent of NGS technology also provides the opportunity to study genetic diseases where sequence variants or mutations are sought to establish a causal relationship with disease phenotypes. However, it is not a trivial task to seek genetic variants responsible for genetic diseases and even harder for complex diseases such as diabetes and cancers. In such polygenic diseases, multiple genes and alleles, which can exist in healthy individuals, come together to contribute to common disease phenotypes in a complex manner. Hence, it is desirable to have an approach that integrates omics data with both knowledge of protein structure and function and an understanding of networks/pathways, i.e. functional genomics and systems biology; in this way, genotype-phenotype relationships can be better understood. In this review, we bring this 'bottom-up' approach alongside the current NGS-driven genetic study of genetic variations and disease aetiology. We describe experimental and computational techniques for assessing genetic variants and their deleterious effects on protein structure and function.