Essential Nodes Identification in Disease Molecular Network Based on Virtual Gene Knockout
基于虚拟基因敲除的疾病分子网络关键节点辨识方法

This paper was aimed to establish essential nodes identification method based on the virtual gene knockout. The disease-related molecular network was used as a subject. This paper virtually knocked-out certain node of the network and thus evaluated the importance of a particular node by introducing the Node Impact Counter (NIC). At last Alzheimer's disease-related network was taken as an example to validate the method. The results showed that the NIC of other nodes decreased significantly after knocking out the known target for Alzheimer's disease, while such phenomenon is not observed when knocking out the non-target nodes. It was concluded that this method can be used to screen out new essential nodes. Examples on Alzheimer's disease-related network show that the method is feasible and reliable.