Prioritizing Disease-Related Microbes Based on the Topological Properties of a Comprehensive Network

In this study, we constructed a comprehensive microbe–disease network by integrating known microbe–disease associations from three large-scale databases (Peryton, Disbiome, and gutMDisorder), and extended the random walk with restart to the network for prioritizing unknown microbe–disease associations. The area under the curve values of the leave-one-out cross-validation and the fivefold cross-validation exceeded 0.9370 and 0.9366, respectively, indicating the high performance of this method. Despite being widely studied diseases, in case studies of inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, and obesity, some prioritized disease-related microbes were validated by recent literature. This suggested that our method is effective at prioritizing novel disease-related microbes and may offer further insight into disease pathogenesis.
Source: Frontiers in Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Source Type: research