Abstract
Background: Malaria is a major health threat, affecting over 40% of the world's population. The latest report released by the World Health Organization estimated about 207 million cases of malaria infection, and about 627,000 deaths in 2012 alone. During the past decade, new therapeutic targets have been identified and are at various stages of characterization, thanks to the emerging omics-based technologies. However, the mechanism of malaria pathogenesis remains largely unknown. In this paper, we employ a novel neighborhood subnetwork alignment approach to identify network components that are potentially involved in pathogenesis. Results: Our module-based subnetwork alignment approach identified 24 functional homologs of pathogenesis-related proteins in the malaria parasite P. falciparum, using the protein-protein interaction networks in Escherichia coli as references. Eighteen out of these 24 proteins are associated with 418 other proteins that are related to DNA replication, transcriptional regulation, translation, signaling, metabolism, cell cycle regulation, as well as cytoadherence and entry to the host. Conclusions: The subnetwork alignments and subsequent protein-protein association network mining predicted a group of malarial proteins that may be involved in parasite development and parasite-host interaction, opening a new systems-level view of parasite pathogenesis and virulence.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | S1 |
| Journal | BMC Systems Biology |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 11 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank PlasmoDB for providing access to malaria omic data. This work is supported by NIH grants GM100806, GM081068 and AI080579 to YW. KR and CH are supported by University of Minnesota Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship. We thank the Computational Biology Initiative at UTSA for providing computational support. This work received computational support from Computational Systems Biology Core, funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (G12MD007591) from the National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, or the National Institutes of Health.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Cai et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
