Systematic Functional Annotation and Visualization of Biological Networks

Large-scale biological networks represent relationships between genes, but our understanding of how networks are functionally organized is limited. Here, I describe spatial analysis of functional enrichment (SAFE), a systematic method for annotating biological networks and examining their functional organization. SAFE visualizes the network in 2D space and measures the continuous distribution of functional enrichment across local neighborhoods, producing a list of the associated functions and a map of their relative positioning. I applied SAFE to annotate the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genetic interaction similarity network and protein-protein interaction network with gene ontology terms. SAFE annotations of the genetic network matched manually derived annotations, while taking less than 1% of the time, and proved robust to noise and sensitive to biological signal. Integration of genetic interaction and chemical genomics data using SAFE revealed a link between vesicle-mediate transport and resistance to the anti-cancer drug bortezomib. These results demonstrate the utility of SAFE for examining biological networks and understanding their functional organization.