An integrated web platform on disease-associated proteins

Chien-Hung Huang, Wen-Wei Zhua

Abstract

In human, a large portion of genes undergoes alternative splicing then translates into different protein isoforms. Translated proteins are activated or repressed through post-translational modification (PTM). Biological processes are mediated by protein-protein interaction (PPI). Many research studies suggested that disease formation involves differential expression of isoforms. Furthermore, both of PTM and PPI are essential for the signal transduction mechanism where defects in such process may lead to disease formation. In this work, disease-associated genes, proteins, alternative products, PTM, Gene Ontology (GO) annotations, subcellular localization and PPI information are integrated to provide a sophisticated platform for disease studies. A total of 39disease types and 47 subcellular localizations information are included in the platform. This platform also provided an index, Jaccard index; to quantify the portion of common proteins involved for any two of the diseases, which may be useful for comorbidity study. A few subcellular localization specific PPI information are available in Cytoscape display format. A web platform has been set up to display the results; it can be accessed at http://bioinfo.csie.nfu.edu.tw/Dis/index.php. Finally, using lung cancer associated genes as a case study, we demonstrate how to use the web platform resource to discover further disease information.