| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 資訊工程學系碩博士班 === 93 === Assimilating the intrinsic workings of biological mechanism to derive prerequisite knowledge and modelling tools has long been an ultimate goal in systems biology. Identification of functional modules, which constitute the building blocks of molecular networks, serves as the cornerstone for the understanding of the relationships and interactions between various parts of a biological system. Researches to date have attempted to uncover modules from protein interaction networks and correlated them with pathways and cellular functions or processes through different visualisations. The current depictions of the relationships of inter- and intra-modules, however, are done manually and the cellular interactions among genes or proteins are not being captured in a single clear global snapshot. All these have impeded the medical researchers or biologists’ ability to efficiently analyse and comprehend the detected functional modules. In this research, we endeavour to provide an interactive and integrated system to discover and visualise functional modules identified from protein-protein interaction networks. With our proposed system, researchers can gain valuable biological insights into the inter-relations of their genes of interests for further analysis via discovered functional modules and the unique visualisations. The association of modules to biological pathways or Gene Ontology classifications delineates the impacts a group of genes or proteins may have in performing cellular functions. At the same time, the auto-generated interactive module group diagram, elucidating genes or proteins’ travelling paths, interacting partners, interaction sites, functional roles and involved biological processes all at once, presents globally the inner workings within a cell. Overall, we have developed an automated functional module discovery application that allows efficient analysis and knowledge discovery.
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