HumanNet v2: human gene networks for disease research
 Authors and Affiliations
 Authors and Affiliations
Sohyun Hwang1,2,3,†, Chan Yeong Kim1,†, Sunmo Yang1, Eiru Kim4, Traver Hart 4, Edward M. Marcotte2,5 and Insuk Lee1,*
1Department of Biotechnology, College of Life Science and Biotechnology, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Korea, 2Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA, 3Department of Biomedical Science, College of Life Science, CHA University, Seongnam-si 13496, Korea, 4Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX USA and 5Department of Molecular Biosciences, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed
†The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as Joint First Authors.
Abstract Human gene networks have proven useful in many aspects of disease research, with numerous network-based strategies developed for generating hypotheses about gene-disease-drug associations. The ability to predict and organize genes most relevant to a specific disease has proven especially important. We previously developed a human functional gene network, HumanNet, by integrating diverse types of omics data using Bayesian statistics framework and demonstrated its ability to retrieve disease genes. Here, we present HumanNet v2 (http://www.inetbio.org/humannet), a database of human gene networks, which was updated by incorporating new data types, extending data sources and improving network inference algorithms. HumanNet now comprises a hierarchy of human gene networks, allowing for more flexible incorporation of network information into studies. HumanNet performs well in ranking disease-linked gene sets with minimal literature-dependent biases. We observe that incorporating model organisms’ protein-protein interactions does not markedly improve disease gene predictions, suggesting that many of the disease gene associations are now captured directly in human-derived datasets. With an improved interactive user interface for disease network analysis, we expect HumanNet will be a useful resource for network medicine.
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