ICBO_2018_52: The integrative use of anatomy ontology and protein-protein interaction networks to study evolutionary phenotypic transitions

<p>Studying evolutionary phenotypic transitions, such as the fin to limb transition, is popular in evolutionary biology. The recent advances in next-generation technologies have accumulated large volumes of genomics and proteomics data, which can be used to analyze the genetic basis for evolutionary phenotypic transitions. Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks can be used to predict candidate genes and identify gene modules related to evolutionary phenotypes; however, they suffer from low gene prediction accuracy. Therefore, an integrative framework was developed using PPI networks and anatomy ontology, which significantly improved the accuracy of network-based candidate gene predictions in zebrafish and mouse. This integrative framework will also be used to identify gene modules associated with the fin to limb transition and to study the changes in these modules which lead to the phenotypic change.</p>