Identification of Functional Modules That Correlate with Phenotypic Difference: The Influence of Network Topology

Abstract

A gene set enrichment analysis method for including network topology in the identification of genes involved in phenotypic alterations is described. One of the important challenges to post-genomic biology is relating observed phenotypic alterations to the underlying collective alterations in genes. Current inferential methods, however, invariably omit large bodies of information on the relationships between genes. We present a method that takes account of such information - expressed in terms of the topology of a correlation network - and we apply the method in the context of current procedures for gene set enrichment analysis.