Multisource biological pathway consolidation

Abstract

A typical method to discover phenotypic descriptions of an ordered set of differential gene expressions is to identify pathway enrichments. There are many pathways that are highly related or maybe redundant across different databases making their consolidation an essential step when interpreting these results. Two methods of pathway consolidation are explored, one utilizes the gene set of the most enriched pathway to find similar pathways also enriched in a given experiment. The other method uses only the gene members in each pathway, this finds de novo pathway clusters independent of any given experiment. Unique consolidation results from both methods are presented, demonstrating their applications in biological studies.