Mining Alzheimer Disease Relevant Proteins From Integrated Protein Interactome Data

Huge unrealized post-genome opportunities remain in the understanding of detailed molecular mechanisms for Alzheimer Disease (AD). In this work, we developed a computational method to rank-order AD-related proteins, based on an initial list of AD-related genes and public human protein interaction data. In this method, we first collected an initial seed list of 65 AD-related genes from the OMIM database and mapped them to 70 AD seed proteins. We then expanded the seed proteins to an enriched AD set of 765 proteins using protein interactions from the Online Predicated Human Interaction Database (OPHID). We showed that the expanded AD-related proteins form a highly connected and statistically significant protein interaction sub-network. We further analyzed the sub-network to develop an algorithm, which can be used to automatically score and rank-order each protein for its biological relevance to AD pathways(s). Our results show that functionally relevant AD proteins were consistently ranked at the top: among the top 20 of 765 expanded AD proteins, 19 proteins are confirmed to belong to the original 70 AD seed protein set. Our method represents a novel use of protein interaction network data for Alzheimer disease studies and may be generalized for other disease areas in the future.