PNME – A gene-gene parallel network module extraction method

In the domain of gene-gene network analysis, construction of co-expression networks and extraction of network modules have opened up enormous possibilities for exploring the role of genes in biological processes. Through such analysis, one can extract interesting behaviour of genes and would help in the discovery of genes participating in a common biological process. However, such network analysis methods in sequential processing mode often have been found time-consuming even for a moderately sized dataset. It is observed that most existing network construction techniques are capable of handling only positive correlations in gene-expression data whereas biologically-significant genes exhibit both positive and negative correlations. To address these problems, we propose a faster method for construction and analysis of gene-gene network and extraction of modules using a similarity measure which can identify both negatively and positively correlated co-expressed patterns. Our method utilizes General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) to provide fast, efficient and parallel extraction of biologically relevant network modules to support biomarker identification for breast cancer. The modules extracted are validated using p-value and q-value for both metastasis and non-metastasis stages of breast cancer. PNME has been found capable of identifying interesting biomarkers for this critical disease. We identified six genes with the interesting behaviours which have been found to cause breast cancer in homo-sapiens.