Analyzing causal relationships in proteomic profiles using CausalPath.

CausalPath (causalpath.org) evaluates proteomic measurements against prior knowledge of biological pathways and infers causality between changes in measured features, such as global protein and phospho-protein levels. It uses pathway resources to determine potential causality between observable omic features, which are called prior relations. The subset of the prior relations that are supported by the proteomic profiles are reported and evaluated for statistical significance. The end result is a network model of signaling that explains the patterns observed in the experimental dataset. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Babur et al. (2021).

Causal interactions from proteomic profiles: Molecular data meet pathway knowledge.

We present a computational method to infer causal mechanisms in cell biology by analyzing changes in high-throughput proteomic profiles on the background of prior knowledge captured in biochemical reaction knowledge bases. The method mimics a biologist's traditional approach of explaining changes in data using prior knowledge but does this at the scale of hundreds of thousands of reactions. This is a specific example of how to automate scientific reasoning processes and illustrates the power of mapping from experimental data to prior knowledge via logic programming. The identified mechanisms can explain how experimental and physiological perturbations, propagating in a network of reactions, affect cellular responses and their phenotypic consequences. Causal pathway analysis is a powerful and flexible discovery tool for a wide range of cellular profiling data types and biological questions. The automated causation inference tool, as well as the source code, are freely available at http://causalpath.org.

Author-sourced capture of pathway knowledge in computable form using Biofactoid.

Making the knowledge contained in scientific papers machine-readable and formally computable would allow researchers to take full advantage of this information by enabling integration with other knowledge sources to support data analysis and interpretation. Here we describe Biofactoid, a web-based platform that allows scientists to specify networks of interactions between genes, their products, and chemical compounds, and then translates this information into a representation suitable for computational analysis, search and discovery. We also report the results of a pilot study to encourage the wide adoption of Biofactoid by the scientific community.

Psychological Parameters for Crowd Simulation: From Audiences to Mobs.

In the social psychology literature, crowds are classified as audiences and mobs. Audiences are passive crowds, whereas mobs are active crowds with emotional, irrational and seemingly homogeneous behavior. In this study, we aim to create a system that enables the specification of different crowd types ranging from audiences to mobs. In order to achieve this goal we parametrize the common properties of mobs to create collective misbehavior. Because mobs are characterized by emotionality, we describe a framework that associates psychological components with individual agents comprising a crowd and yields emergent behaviors in the crowd as a whole. To explore the effectiveness of our framework we demonstrate two scenarios simulating the behavior of distinct mob types.