Multi-label Deep Learning for Gene Function Annotation in Cancer Pathways.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

The war on cancer is progressing globally but slowly as researchers around the world continue to seek and discover more innovative and effective ways of curing this catastrophic disease. Organizing biological information, representing it, and making it accessible, or biocuration, is an important aspect of biomedical research and discovery. However, because maintaining sophisticated biocuration is highly resource dependent, it continues to lag behind the continually being generated biomedical data. Another critical aspect of cancer research, pathway analysis, has proven to be an efficient method for gaining insight into the underlying biology associated with cancer. We propose a deep-learning-based model, Stacked Denoising Autoencoder Multi-Label Learning (SdaMLL), for facilitating gene multi-function discovery and pathway completion. SdaMLL can capture intermediate representations robust to partial corruption of the input pattern and generate low-dimensional codes superior to conditional dimension reduction tools. Experimental results indicate that SdaMLL outperforms existing classical multi-label algorithms. Moreover, we found some gene functions, such as Fused in Sarcoma (FUS, which may be part of transcriptional misregulation in cancer) and p27 (which we expect will become a member viral carcinogenesis), that can be used to complete the related pathways. We provide a visual tool ( https://www.keaml.cn/gpvisual ) to view the new gene functions in cancer pathways.

Authors

  • Renchu Guan
    Key Laboratory for Symbol Computation and Knowledge Engineering of National Education Ministry, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China.
  • Xu Wang
    Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907.
  • Mary Qu Yang
    MidSouth Bioinformatics Center and Joint Bioinformatics Ph.D. Program of University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Univ. of Arkansas Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, 72204, USA.
  • Yu Zhang
    College of Marine Electrical Engineering, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China.
  • Fengfeng Zhou
  • Chen Yang
    Department of Diagnostic Ultrasound Imaging & Interventional Therapy, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine (HIM), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China.
  • Yanchun Liang
    * College of Computer Science and Technology, Key Laboratory of Symbolic, Computation and Knowledge, Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, P. R. China.