Effective Boolean dynamics analysis to identify functionally important genes in large-scale signaling networks

Efficiently identifying functionally important genes in order to understand the minimal requirements of normal cellular development is challenging. To this end, a variety of structural measures have been proposed and their effectiveness has been investigated in recent literature; however, few studies have shown the effectiveness of dynamics-based measures. This led us to investigate a dynamic measure to identify functionally important genes, and the effectiveness of which was verified through application on two large-scale human signaling networks. We specifically consider Boolean sensitivity-based dynamics against an update-rule perturbation (BSU) as a dynamic measure. Through investigations on two large-scale human signaling networks, we found that genes with relatively high BSU values show slower evolutionary rate and higher proportions of essential genes and drug targets than other genes. Gene-ontology analysis showed clear differences between the former and latter groups of genes. Furthermore, we compare the identification accuracies of essential genes and drug targets via BSU and five well-known structural measures. Although BSU did not always show the best performance, it effectively identified the putative set of genes, which is significantly different from the results obtained via the structural measures. Most interestingly, BSU showed the highest synergy effect in identifying the functionally important genes in conjunction with other measures. Our results imply that Boolean-sensitive dynamics can be used as a measure to effectively identify functionally important genes in signaling networks.