Detection of Driver Protein Complexes in Breast Cancer Metastasis by Large-Scale TranscriptomeInteractome Integration

With the development of high-throughput gene expression profiling technologies came the opportunity to define genomic signatures predicting clinical condition or cancer patient outcome. However, such signatures show dependency on training set, lack of generalization, and instability, partly due to microarray data topology. Additional issues for analyzing tumor gene expression are that subtle molecular perturbations in driver genes leading to cancer and metastasis (masked in typical differential expression analysis) may provoke expression changes of greater amplitude in downstream genes (easily detected). In this chapter, we are describing an interactome-based algorithm, Interactome–Transcriptome Integration (ITI) that is used to find a generalizable signature for prediction of breast cancer relapse by superimposition of a large-scale protein–protein interaction data (human interactome) over several gene expression datasets. ITI extracts regions in the interactome whose expression is discriminating for predicting relapse-free survival in cancer and allow detection of subnetworks that constitutes a generalizable and stable genomic signature. In this chapter, we describe the practical aspects of running the full ITI pipeline (subnetwork detection and classification) on six microarray datasets.