Modeling the Attractor Landscape of Disease Progression: a Network-Based Approach.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide regulatory networks enable cells to function, develop, and survive. Perturbation of these networks can lead to appearance of a disease phenotype. Inspired by Conrad Waddington's epigenetic landscape of cell development, we use a Hopfield network formalism to construct an attractor landscape model of disease progression based on protein- or gene-correlation networks of Parkinson's disease, glioma, and colorectal cancer. Attractors in this landscape correspond to normal and disease states of the cell. We introduce approaches to estimate the size and robustness of these attractors, and take a network-based approach to study their biological features such as the key genes and their functions associated with the attractors. Our results show that the attractor of cancer cells is wide

SUBMITTER: Taherian Fard A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5394169 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature