Acquisition of diabetes-related biological associations using a motif based network: Preliminary results

Diabetes remains the 7th leading cause of death in the US in 2010. There is an urgent need to find effective solutions to prevent and treat diabetes. With the advance in computational technology, computer-aided approaches has attracted much interest given the promising findings been generated accordingly. In this study, we introduced an approach that applied network analysis to reveal novel biological associations for diabetes from a large biological interaction network. In particular, network motif discovery has been performed to identify diabetes relevant motif-based network, from where the diabetes relevant biological associations can be detected via perturbation. The associations identified from this study will not only illustrate possible biological mechanism for diabetes, but also support biomedical application development ultimately, such as drug repositioning.