Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Computational Biology Colloquium | “Detecting early-warning signals of complex diseases by dynamical network biomarkers”

Luonan Chen
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences
Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

Tuesday April 14, 2015
2:00 pm
RRI 101
Host:  Jasmine Zhou

Abstract: Considerable evidence suggests that during the progression of complex diseases, the deteriorations are not necessarily smooth but are abrupt, and may cause a critical transition from one state to another at a tipping point. Here, we develop a model-free method to detect early-warning signals of such critical transitions, even with only a small number of samples. Specifically, we theoretically derive an index based on a dynamical network biomarker (DNB) that serves as a general early-warning signal indicating an imminent bifurcation or sudden deterioration before the critical transition of a disease occurs. Based on theoretical analyses, we show that predicting a sudden transition from small samples is achievable provided that there are a large number of measurements for each sample, e.g., high-throughput data. We employ microarray data of three diseases to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The relevance of DNBs with the diseases was also validated by related experimental data and functional analysis.




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