Asthma is a respiratory syndrome associated with airflow limitation, bronchial hyperresponsiveness and inflammation of the airways in the lungs. Despite the ongoing research efforts, the outstanding heterogeneity displayed by the multiple forms in which this condition presents often hampers the attempts to determine and classify the phenotypic and endotypic biological structures at play, even when considering a limited assembly of asthmatic subjects. To increase our understanding of the molecular mechanisms and functional pathways that govern asthma from a systems medicine perspective, a computational workflow focused on the identification of personalized transcriptomic modules from the U-BIOPRED study cohorts, by the use of the novel MODifieR integrated R package, was designed and applied. A feature selection of candidate asthma biomarkers was implemented, accompanied by the detection of differentially expressed genes across sample categories, the production of patient-specific gene modules and the subsequent construction of a set of core disease modules of asthma, which were validated with genomic data and analyzed for pathway and disease enrichment. The results indicate that the approach utilized is able to reveal the presence of components and signaling routes known to be crucially involved in asthma pathogenesis, while simultaneously uncovering candidate genes closely linked to the latter. The present project establishes a valuable pipeline for the module-driven study of asthma and other related conditions, which can provide new potential targets for therapeutic intervention and contribute to the development of individualized treatment strategies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:his-15987 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Martínez Enguita, David |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för biovetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds