Computational approaches for prioritizing candidate disease genes based on PPI networks

With the continuing development and improvement of genome-wide techniques, a great number of candidate genes are discovered. How to identify the most likely disease genes among a large number of candidates becomes a fundamental challenge in human health. A common view is that genes related to a specific or similar disease tend to reside in the same neighbourhood of biomolecular networks. Recently, based on such observations, many methods have been developed to tackle this challenge. In this review, we firstly introduce the concept of disease genes, their properties, and available data for identifying them. Then we review the recent computational approaches for prioritizing candidate disease genes based on Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks and investigate their advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, some pieces of existing software and network resources are summarized. Finally, we discuss key issues in prioritizing candidate disease genes and point out some future research directions.