Abstract: Networks are scaling-up the analysis of gene and protein functions, hence offering new avenues to study the diseases in which these genes and proteins are involved. I will discuss the exploration of biological networks containing thousands of physical and functional interactions between proteins. In particular, we now focus on multiplex networks, i.e., networks composed of layers containing the same nodes but different interaction categories, such as protein-protein interaction, molecular complexes or co-expression. We have developed partitioning algorithms to recover communities – or functional modules – from these more complex and data-rich networks, and use them to study the cellular functions of genes and proteins of interest. Recently, we also adopted a random walk strategy to navigate multiplex networks, and extract information about genes and proteins implicated in rare genetic diseases associated with a premature aging phenotype. I will finally show ongoing work dedicated to the disease-contextualization of biological networks thanks to the integration of protein or RNA expression data.

Venue: Aula de Teleensenyament

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