A modularity-based method reveals mixed modules from chemical-gene heterogeneous network

PLoS One. 2015 Apr 30;10(4):e0125585. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125585. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

For a multicomponent therapy, molecular network is essential to uncover its specific mode of action from a holistic perspective. The molecular system of a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formula can be represented by a 2-class heterogeneous network (2-HN), which typically includes chemical similarities, chemical-target interactions and gene interactions. An important premise of uncovering the molecular mechanism is to identify mixed modules from complex chemical-gene heterogeneous network of a TCM formula. We thus proposed a novel method (MixMod) based on mixed modularity to detect accurate mixed modules from 2-HNs. At first, we compared MixMod with Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm (CNM), Markov Cluster algorithm (MCL), Infomap and Louvain on benchmark 2-HNs with known module structure. Results showed that MixMod was superior to other methods when 2-HNs had promiscuous module structure. Then these methods were tested on a real drug-target network, in which 88 disease clusters were regarded as real modules. MixMod could identify the most accurate mixed modules from the drug-target 2-HN (normalized mutual information 0.62 and classification accuracy 0.4524). In the end, MixMod was applied to the 2-HN of Buchang naoxintong capsule (BNC) and detected 49 mixed modules. By using enrichment analysis, we investigated five mixed modules that contained primary constituents of BNC intestinal absorption liquid. As a matter of fact, the findings of in vitro experiments using BNC intestinal absorption liquid were found to highly accord with previous analysis. Therefore, MixMod is an effective method to detect accurate mixed modules from chemical-gene heterogeneous networks and further uncover the molecular mechanism of multicomponent therapies, especially TCM formulae.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal / pharmacology*
  • Gene Expression Regulation / drug effects*
  • Gene Regulatory Networks / drug effects*
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Medicine, Chinese Traditional*
  • Models, Animal
  • Models, Biological*
  • Rats

Substances

  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal
  • buchang naoxintong

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 81303152, 81330086, and 81203005) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central public welfare research institutes (grant no. ZZ070830).