Gene target discovery with network analysis in Toxoplasma gondii

ALONSO, ANDRÉS MARIANO; CORVI MM; DIAMBRA LUIS

Scientific Reports

Nature Publishing Group

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2019

2045-2322

Infectious diseases are of great relevance for global health, but needed drugs and vaccines have not been developed yet or are not effective in many cases. In fact, traditional scientific approaches with intense focus on individual genes or proteins have not been successful in providing new treatments. Hence, innovations in technology and computational methods provide new tools to further understand complex biological systems such as pathogens biology. In this work, we propose a system biology approach to analyze transcriptomic data of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii . By means of an optimization procedure, the phenotypic transitions between the stages associated with the life cycle of the parasite were embedded into the dynamics of a gene network model. Thus, through this methodology we were able to reconstruct a gene regulatory network able to emulate the life cycle of the pathogen. The community network analysis has revealed that nodes of the network can be organized in seven communities which allow us to assign putative functions to 339 previously uncharacterized genes, 25 of which are predicted as new pathogenic factors. Furthermore, we identified a small subnetwork module that controls the parasite´s life cycle. These new findings can contribute to understand of parasite pathogenesis.