System Level Meta-analysis of Microarray Datasets for Elucidation of Diabetes Mellitus Pathobiology

BACKGROUND: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a common multi-factorial disease that is primarily ac-counted to ineffective insulin action in lowering blood glucose level and later escalates to impaired insu-lin secretion by pancreatic β cells. Deregulation in insulin signaling to its target organs is attributed to this disease phenotype. Various genome-wide microarray studies from multiple insulin responsive tis-sues have been conducted in past but due to inherent noise in microarray data and heterogeneity in dis-ease etiology; reproduction of prioritized pathways/genes is very low across various studies. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we aim to identify consensus signaling and metabolic pathways through system level meta-analysis of multiple expression-sets to elucidate T2D pathobiology. METHOD: We used ‘R’, an open source statistical environment, which is routinely used for Microarray data analysis particularly using special sets of packages available at Bioconductor. We primarily focused on gene-set analysis methods to elucidate various aspects of T2D. RESULT: Literature-based evidences have shown the success of our approach in exploring various known aspects of diabetes pathophysiology. CONCLUSION: Our study stressed the need to develop novel bioinformatics workflows to advance our understanding further in insulin signaling