A travel guide to Cytoscape plugins.

Cytoscape is open-source software for integration, visualization and analysis of biological networks. It can be extended through Cytoscape plugins, enabling a broad community of scientists to contribute useful features. This growth has occurred organically through the independent efforts of diverse authors, yielding a powerful but heterogeneous set of tools. We present a travel guide to the world of plugins, covering the 152 publicly available plugins for Cytoscape 2.5-2.8. We also describe ongoing efforts to distribute, organize and maintain the quality of the collection.

PiNGO: a Cytoscape plugin to find candidate genes in biological networks.

UNLABELLED: PiNGO is a tool to screen biological networks for candidate genes, i.e. genes predicted to be involved in a biological process of interest. The user can narrow the search to genes with particular known functions or exclude genes belonging to particular functional classes. PiNGO provides support for a wide range of organisms and Gene Ontology classification schemes, and it can easily be customized for other organisms and functional classifications. PiNGO is implemented as a plugin for Cytoscape, a popular network visualization platform. AVAILABILITY: PiNGO is distributed as an open-source Java package under the GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/), and can be downloaded via the Cytoscape plugin manager. A detailed user guide and tutorial are available on the PiNGO website (http://www.psb.ugent.be/esb/PiNGO.

Cytoscape 2.8: new features for data integration and network visualization.

UNLABELLED: Cytoscape is a popular bioinformatics package for biological network visualization and data integration. Version 2.8 introduces two powerful new features--Custom Node Graphics and Attribute Equations--which can be used jointly to greatly enhance Cytoscape's data integration and visualization capabilities. Custom Node Graphics allow an image to be projected onto a node, including images generated dynamically or at remote locations. Attribute Equations provide Cytoscape with spreadsheet-like functionality in which the value of an attribute is computed dynamically as a function of other attributes and network properties. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Cytoscape is a desktop Java application released under the Library Gnu Public License (LGPL). Binary install bundles and source code for Cytoscape 2.8 are available for download from http://cytoscape.org.

Improving pairwise sequence alignment accuracy using near-optimal protein sequence alignments.

BACKGROUND: While the pairwise alignments produced by sequence similarity searches are a powerful tool for identifying homologous proteins - proteins that share a common ancestor and a similar structure; pairwise sequence alignments often fail to represent accurately the structural alignments inferred from three-dimensional coordinates. Since sequence alignment algorithms produce optimal alignments, the best structural alignments must reflect suboptimal sequence alignment scores. Thus, we have examined a range of suboptimal sequence alignments and a range of scoring parameters to understand better which sequence alignments are likely to be more structurally accurate. RESULTS: We compared near-optimal protein sequence alignments produced by the Zuker algorithm and a set of probabilistic alignments produced by the probA program with structural alignments produced by four different structure alignment algorithms. There is significant overlap between the solution spaces of structural alignments and both the near-optimal sequence alignments produced by commonly used scoring parameters for sequences that share significant sequence similarity (E-values < 10-5) and the ensemble of probA alignments. We constructed a logistic regression model incorporating three input variables derived from sets of near-optimal alignments: robustness, edge frequency, and maximum bits-per-position. A ROC analysis shows that this model more accurately classifies amino acid pairs (edges in the alignment path graph) according to the likelihood of appearance in structural alignments than the robustness score alone. We investigated various trimming protocols for removing incorrect edges from the optimal sequence alignment; the most effective protocol is to remove matches from the semi-global optimal alignment that are outside the boundaries of the local alignment, although trimming according to the model-generated probabilities achieves a similar level of improvement. The model can also be used to generate novel alignments by using the probabilities in lieu of a scoring matrix. These alignments are typically better than the optimal sequence alignment, and include novel correct structural edges. We find that the probA alignments sample a larger variety of alignments than the Zuker set, which more frequently results in alignments that are closer to the structural alignments, but that using the probA alignments as input to the regression model does not increase performance. CONCLUSIONS: The pool of suboptimal pairwise protein sequence alignments substantially overlaps structure-based alignments for pairs with statistically significant similarity, and a regression model based on information contained in this alignment pool improves the accuracy of pairwise alignments with respect to structure-based alignments.

Fast statistical alignment.

We describe a new program for the alignment of multiple biological sequences that is both statistically motivated and fast enough for problem sizes that arise in practice. Our Fast Statistical Alignment program is based on pair hidden Markov models which approximate an insertion/deletion process on a tree and uses a sequence annealing algorithm to combine the posterior probabilities estimated from these models into a multiple alignment. FSA uses its explicit statistical model to produce multiple alignments which are accompanied by estimates of the alignment accuracy and uncertainty for every column and character of the alignment--previously available only with alignment programs which use computationally-expensive Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches--yet can align thousands of long sequences. Moreover, FSA utilizes an unsupervised query-specific learning procedure for parameter estimation which leads to improved accuracy on benchmark reference alignments in comparison to existing programs. The centroid alignment approach taken by FSA, in combination with its learning procedure, drastically reduces the amount of false-positive alignment on biological data in comparison to that given by other methods. The FSA program and a companion visualization tool for exploring uncertainty in alignments can be used via a web interface at http://orangutan.math.berkeley.edu/fsa/, and the source code is available at http://fsa.sourceforge.net/.

Cytoscape: the network visualization tool for GenomeSpace workflows.

Modern genomic analysis often requires workflows incorporating multiple best-of-breed tools. GenomeSpace is a web-based visual workbench that combines a selection of these tools with mechanisms that create data flows between them. One such tool is Cytoscape 3, a popular application that enables analysis and visualization of graph-oriented genomic networks. As Cytoscape runs on the desktop, and not in a web browser, integrating it into GenomeSpace required special care in creating a seamless user experience and enabling appropriate data flows. In this paper, we present the design and operation of the Cytoscape GenomeSpace app, which accomplishes this integration, thereby providing critical analysis and visualization functionality for GenomeSpace users. It has been downloaded over 850 times since the release of its first version in September, 2013.

The protein architecture of human secretory vesicles reveals differential regulation of signaling molecule secretion by protein kinases.

Secretory vesicles are required for release of chemical messengers to mediate intercellular signaling among human biological systems. It is necessary to define the organization of the protein architecture of the 'human' dense core secretory vesicles (DCSV) to understand mechanisms for secretion of signaling molecules essential for cellular regulatory processes. This study, therefore, conducted extensive quantitative proteomics and systems biology analyses of human DCSV purified from human pheochromocytoma. Over 600 human DCSV proteins were identified with quantitative evaluation of over 300 proteins, revealing that most proteins participate in producing peptide hormones and neurotransmitters, enzymes, and the secretory machinery. Systems biology analyses provided a model of interacting DCSV proteins, generating hypotheses for differential intracellular protein kinases A and C signaling pathways. Activation of cellular PKA and PKC pathways resulted in differential secretion of neuropeptides, catecholamines, and ß-amyloid of Alzheimer's disease for mediating cell-cell communication. This is the first study to define a model of the protein architecture of human DCSV for human disease and health.

Assembling global maps of cellular function through integrative analysis of physical and genetic networks.

To take full advantage of high-throughput genetic and physical interaction mapping projects, the raw interactions must first be assembled into models of cell structure and function. PanGIA (for physical and genetic interaction alignment) is a plug-in for the bioinformatics platform Cytoscape, designed to integrate physical and genetic interactions into hierarchical module maps. PanGIA identifies 'modules' as sets of proteins whose physical and genetic interaction data matches that of known protein complexes. Higher-order functional cooperativity and redundancy is identified by enrichment for genetic interactions across modules. This protocol begins with importing interaction networks into Cytoscape, followed by filtering and basic network visualization. Next, PanGIA is used to infer a set of modules and their functional inter-relationships. This module map is visualized in a number of intuitive ways, and modules are tested for functional enrichment and overlap with known complexes. The full protocol can be completed between 10 and 30 min, depending on the size of the data set being analyzed.

Exploring biological networks with Cytoscape software.

Cytoscape is a free software package for visualizing, modeling, and analyzing molecular and genetic interaction networks. As a key feature, Cytoscape enables biologists to determine and analyze the interconnectivity of a list of genes or proteins. This unit explains how to use Cytoscape to load and navigate biological network information and view mRNA expression profiles and other functional genomics and proteomics data in the context of the network obtained for genes of interest. Additional analyses that can be performed with Cytoscape are also discussed.

Integration of biological networks and gene expression data using Cytoscape.

Cytoscape is a free software package for visualizing, modeling and analyzing molecular and genetic interaction networks. This protocol explains how to use Cytoscape to analyze the results of mRNA expression profiling, and other functional genomics and proteomics experiments, in the context of an interaction network obtained for genes of interest. Five major steps are described: (i) obtaining a gene or protein network, (ii) displaying the network using layout algorithms, (iii) integrating with gene expression and other functional attributes, (iv) identifying putative complexes and functional modules and (v) identifying enriched Gene Ontology annotations in the network. These steps provide a broad sample of the types of analyses performed by Cytoscape.

Visualization of near-optimal sequence alignments.

MOTIVATION: Mathematically optimal alignments do not always properly align active site residues or well-recognized structural elements. Most near-optimal sequence alignment algorithms display alternative alignment paths, rather than the conventional residue-by-residue pairwise alignment. Typically, these methods do not provide mechanisms for finding effectively the most biologically meaningful alignment in the potentially large set of options. RESULTS: We have developed Web-based software that displays near optimal or alternative alignments of two protein or DNA sequences as a continuous moving picture. A WWW interface to a C++ program generates near optimal alignments, which are sent to a Java Applet, which displays them in a series of alignment frames. The Applet aligns residues so that consistently aligned regions remain at a fixed position on the display, while variable regions move. The display can be stopped to examine alignment details.

Versatile and open software for comparing large genomes.

The newest version of MUMmer easily handles comparisons of large eukaryotic genomes at varying evolutionary distances, as demonstrated by applications to multiple genomes. Two new graphical viewing tools provide alternative ways to analyze genome alignments. The new system is the first version of MUMmer to be released as open-source software. This allows other developers to contribute to the code base and freely redistribute the code. The MUMmer sources are available at http://www.tigr.org/software/mummer.