Dynamically dysfunctional protein interactions in the development of Alzheimer s disease

摘要

Alzheimer's disease usually causes dementia in the old people and the symptom progression of the disease phenotype displays certain patterns. One possible reason is that the nerve cells in the brains of the patients degenerate at different stages. Here, we analyze the dynamics of disease progression based on its biomolecular network. We develop a novel computational method to integrate an ensemble protein network and the hippocampal gene expression data. Specifically, we construct the induced dynamical pathways which present particular characteristics at different disease stages from the control to disease samples. Based on the network-based method, we reveal that the active pathways tend to be more complicated during the development of disease. Also we find that the disease proteins performing important functions are always located in the cooperations of the identified pathways. These results also demonstrate that the network-based analysis can provide knowledge and evidences on the dynamics and pathological pathways of the complex Alzheimer's disease.