No Arabic abstract
The problem of reconstructing and identifying intracellular protein signaling and biochemical networks is of critical importance in biology today. We sought to develop a mathematical approach to this problem using, as a test case, one of the most well-studied and clinically important signaling networks in biology today, the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) driven signaling cascade. More specifically, we suggest a method, augmented sparse reconstruction, for the identification of links among nodes of ordinary differential equation (ODE) networks from a small set of trajectories with different initial conditions. Our method builds a system of representation by using a collection of integrals of all given trajectories and by attenuating block of terms in the representation itself. The system of representation is then augmented with random vectors, and minimization of the 1-norm is used to find sparse representations for the dynamical interactions of each node. Augmentation by random vectors is crucial, since sparsity alone is not able to handle the large error-in-variables in the representation. Augmented sparse reconstruction allows to consider potentially very large spaces of models and it is able to detect with high accuracy the few relevant links among nodes, even when moderate noise is added to the measured trajectories. After showing the performance of our method on a model of the EGFR protein network, we sketch briefly the potential future therapeutic applications of this approach.
Motivation: High-throughput experimental techniques have been producing more and more protein-protein interaction (PPI) data. PPI network alignment greatly benefits the understanding of evolutionary relationship among species, helps identify conserved sub-networks and provides extra information for functional annotations. Although a few methods have been developed for multiple PPI network alignment, the alignment quality is still far away from perfect and thus, new network alignment methods are needed. Result: In this paper, we present a novel method, denoted as ConvexAlign, for joint alignment of multiple PPI networks by convex optimization of a scoring function composed of sequence similarity, topological score and interaction conservation score. In contrast to existing methods that generate multiple alignments in a greedy or progressive manner, our convex method optimizes alignments globally and enforces consistency among all pairwise alignments, resulting in much better alignment quality. Tested on both synthetic and real data, our experimental results show that ConvexAlign outperforms several popular methods in producing functionally coherent alignments. ConvexAlign even has a larger advantage over the others in aligning real PPI networks. ConvexAlign also finds a few conserved complexes among 5 species which cannot be detected by the other methods.
Complexes of physically interacting proteins are one of the fundamental functional units responsible for driving key biological mechanisms within the cell. Their identification is therefore necessary not only to understand complex formation but also the higher level organization of the cell. With the advent of high-throughput techniques in molecular biology, significant amount of physical interaction data has been cataloged from organisms such as yeast, which has in turn fueled computational approaches to systematically mine complexes from the network of physical interactions among proteins (PPI network). In this survey, we review, classify and evaluate some of the key computational methods developed till date for the identification of protein complexes from PPI networks. We present two insightful taxonomies that reflect how these methods have evolved over the years towards improving automated complex prediction. We also discuss some open challenges facing accurate reconstruction of complexes, the crucial ones being presence of high proportion of errors and noise in current high-throughput datasets and some key aspects overlooked by current complex detection methods. We hope this review will not only help to condense the history of computational complex detection for easy reference, but also provide valuable insights to drive further research in this area.
In protein-protein interaction networks certain topological properties appear to be recurrent: networks maps are considered scale-free. It is possible that this topology is reflected in the protein structure. In this paper we investigate the role of protein disorder in the network topology. We find that the disorder of a protein (or of its neighbors) is independent of its number of protein-protein interactions. This result suggests that protein disorder does not play a role in the scale-free architecture of protein networks.
Much research effort has been devoted to developing methods for reconstructing the links of a network from dynamics of its nodes. Many current methods require the measurements of the dynamics of all the nodes be known. In real-world problems, it is common that either some nodes of a network of interest are unknown or the measurements of some nodes are unavailable. These nodes, either unknown or whose measurements are unavailable, are called hidden nodes. In this paper, we derive analytical results that explain the effects of hidden nodes on the reconstruction of bidirectional networks. These theoretical results and their implications are verified by numerical studies.
In general-purpose particle detectors, the particle-flow algorithm may be used to reconstruct a comprehensive particle-level view of the event by combining information from the calorimeters and the trackers, significantly improving the detector resolution for jets and the missing transverse momentum. In view of the planned high-luminosity upgrade of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it is necessary to revisit existing reconstruction algorithms and ensure that both the physics and computational performance are sufficient in an environment with many simultaneous proton-proton interactions (pileup). Machine learning may offer a prospect for computationally efficient event reconstruction that is well-suited to heterogeneous computing platforms, while significantly improving the reconstruction quality over rule-based algorithms for granular detectors. We introduce MLPF, a novel, end-to-end trainable, machine-learned particle-flow algorithm based on parallelizable, computationally efficient, and scalable graph neural networks optimized using a multi-task objective on simulated events. We report the physics and computational performance of the MLPF algorithm on a Monte Carlo dataset of top quark-antiquark pairs produced in proton-proton collisions in conditions similar to those expected for the high-luminosity LHC. The MLPF algorithm improves the physics response with respect to a rule-based benchmark algorithm and demonstrates computationally scalable particle-flow reconstruction in a high-pileup environment.