Comparison of Pathways from Mammalian Organisms

Animal models are very important for the study of human diseases and for the development of new treatment therapies. However, it is very challenging to identify the regulatory genes and pathways in an animal model that would be useful to generate reliable hypotheses about a phenotype of interest in human. In order to transfer knowledge from one species to another, it is crucial to take into account the intrinsic differences in cellular organization and regulation between human and animal models as well as the mechanisms underlying the specific phenotype.

Therefore, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the similarities and differences of pathways in mammalian organisms using publicly available knowledge on tissue expression, orthology relationships, regulatory interactions of coding and non-coding genes as well as experimentally determined protein-protein interactions. We design a comparison framework that provides different levels of detail based on the integration of different types of data and network analysis techniques. We use the orthology relationships between participating genes to determine and visualize the overlap of already existing pathways and interaction networks. To highlight the differences between these pathways in different organisms and tissue types, we further integrate them with tissue expression data from the updated and extended version of the TISSUES database, which now covers several mammalian organisms.