Author(s)

Shudong Wang, Yuanyuan Zhang, Kaikai Li, Dazhi Meng

Shandong University of Science and Technology College of Information Science and Engineering, Qingdao, Shandong, China.

Analyzing gene network structure is an important way to discover and understand some unknown relevant functions and regulatory mechanisms of organism at the molecular level. In this work, mutual information networks and Boolean logic networks are constructed using the methods of reverse modeling based on gene expression profiles in lung tissues with and without cancer. The comparison of these network structures shows that average degree, the proportion of non-isolated nodes, average betweenness and average coreness can distinguish the networks corresponding to the lung tissues with and without cancer. According to the difference of degree, betweenness and coreness of each gene in these networks, nine structural key genes are obtained. Seven of them which are related to lung cancer are supported by literatures. The remaining two genes AKT1 and RBL may have important roles in the formation, development and metastasis of lung cancer. Furthermore, the contrast of these logic networks suggests that the distributions of logic types are obviously different. The structural differences can help us to understand the mechanism of formation and development of lung cancer.

Systems Biology; Gene Network; Logic Network; Structural Parameter; Lung Cancer

S. Wang, Y. Zhang, K. Li and D. Meng, "A Novel Analytical Method for Structural Characteristics of Gene Networks and its Application," Computational Molecular Bioscience, Vol. 2 No. 3, 2012, pp. 92-101. doi: 10.4236/cmb.2012.23009.