PNNL

Abstract

One of the core tasks of the emerging discipline of systems biology is the reconstruction of the various biological networks in an organism. The importance of understanding such regulatory, interaction, and signaling networks has fueled the development by bioinformatics researchers of many inference algorithms for determining their structure. The Software Environment for BIological Network Inference (SEBINI) has been created to provide an interactive environment for the deployment, testing, and improvement of algorithms used to reconstruct the structures of regulatory and interaction networks from high-throughput expression data. Networks inferred from the SEBINI software platform can be further analyzed using the Collective Analysis of Biological Interaction Networks (CABIN) tool, a software package for exploratory data analysis that allows basic integration and analysis of protein-protein interaction and gene-to-gene regulatory evidence obtained from multiple sources. Thus, the combined SEBINI–CABIN platform aids in the more accurate determination of biological networks, in less time, with less effort. In this paper, we present a case study demonstrating the use of the SEBINI and CABIN tools for protein-protein interaction network reconstruction. Incorporating the Bayesian Estimator of Protein-Protein Association Probabilities (BEPro) algorithm into the SEBINI toolkit, we have created a pipeline for structural inference and supplemental analysis of protein-protein interaction networks from sets of mass spectrometry bait-prey experiment data. To the best of our knowledge the pipeline so designed is the first to be publicly available for such use. A demonstration web site for SEBINI can be accessed from https://www.emsl.pnl.gov/NIT/NIT.html. Source code and PostgreSQL database schema are available under open source license. Contact: ronald.taylor@pnl.gov. For commercial use, some algorithms included in SEBINI require licensing from the original developers. The BEPro algorithm is available under GNU license within SEBINI and separately at http://www.pnl.gov/statistics/BEPro3/index.htm. Contact: ds.daly@pnl.gov. CABIN can be accessed from SEBINI or downloaded separately from www.sysbio.org/dataresources/cabin.stm. Contact: mudita.singhal@pnl.gov.