AD-Syn-Net: systematic identification of Alzheimer's disease-associated mutation and co-mutation vulnerabilities via deep learning.

Journal: Briefings in bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most challenging neurodegenerative diseases because of its complicated and progressive mechanisms, and multiple risk factors. Increasing research evidence demonstrates that genetics may be a key factor responsible for the occurrence of the disease. Although previous reports identified quite a few AD-associated genes, they were mostly limited owing to patient sample size and selection bias. There is a lack of comprehensive research aimed to identify AD-associated risk mutations systematically. To address this challenge, we hereby construct a large-scale AD mutation and co-mutation framework ('AD-Syn-Net'), and propose deep learning models named Deep-SMCI and Deep-CMCI configured with fully connected layers that are capable of predicting cognitive impairment of subjects effectively based on genetic mutation and co-mutation profiles. Next, we apply the customized frameworks to data sets to evaluate the importance scores of the mutations and identified mutation effectors and co-mutation combination vulnerabilities contributing to cognitive impairment. Furthermore, we evaluate the influence of mutation pairs on the network architecture to dissect the genetic organization of AD and identify novel co-mutations that could be responsible for dementia, laying a solid foundation for proposing future targeted therapy for AD precision medicine. Our deep learning model codes are available open access here: https://github.com/Pan-Bio/AD-mutation-effectors.

Authors

  • Xingxin Pan
    BGI Education Center, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518083, China. panxingxin16@mails.ucas.ac.cn.
  • Zeynep H Coban Akdemir
    Human Genetics Center, Department of Epidemiology, Human Genetics, and Environmental Sciences, School of Public Health, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • Ruixuan Gao
    Departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
  • Xiaoqian Jiang
    School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health, Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
  • Gloria M Sheynkman
    Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
  • Erxi Wu
    Livestrong Cancer Institutes, and Department of Oncology, Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
  • Jason H Huang
    Neuroscience Institute and Department of Neurosurgery, Baylor Scott & White Health, Temple, TX 76502, USA.
  • Nidhi Sahni
    Department of Epigenetics and Molecular Carcinogenesis, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77054, USA.
  • S Stephen Yi
    Livestrong Cancer Institutes, and Department of Oncology, Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.