Prediction of Metabolic Gene Biomarkers for Neurodegenerative Disease by an Integrated Network-Based Approach

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and Huntington's disease (HD), have become more and more common among aged people worldwide. One hallmark of NDs is the presence of intracellular accumulation of specific pathogenic proteins that may result from abnormal function of metabolic processes. Previously, we have developed a computational method named Met-express that predicted key enzyme-coding genes in cancer development by integrating cancer gene coexpression network with the metabolic network. Here, we applied Met-express to predict key enzyme-coding genes in both PD and HD. Functional enrichment analysis and literature review of predicted genes suggested that there might be some common pathogenic metabolic pathways for PD and HD. We further found that the predicted genes had significant functional association with known disease genes, with some of them already documented as biomarkers or therapeutic targets for NDs. As such, the predicted metabolic genes may be of use as novel biomarkers not only for ND diagnosis but also for potential therapeutic treatments.