Abstract The immune system manifests itself through various cellular and molecular events at different scales dynamically. The data accumulated at NIH ImmPort repository provide a great opportunity to deepen our understanding of the immune system, in the contexts of vaccine studies, transplantation, infectious diseases, etc. Novel bioinformatics tools are important to integrate and interpret these data, obtained from different technologies and some of high-dimensions. We propose Multiscale, Multifactorial Immune Networks (MMIN) as a framework to effectively integrate different data types. This work will build on our popular tools, blood transcription modules (BTMs) and mummichog, to combine intelligent dimension reduction techniques with partial least square regression to construct association networks that enable cross-type data queries. The MMIN will be provided as a free web service, with the option to be fully integrated into ImmPort. Selected datasets from ImmPort will be used for testing, documentation and reanalysis. We will further apply MMIN to examine the involvement of heme biosynthesis in the immune responses across studies.
Computational modeling of the immune system is important to the development of vaccines, understanding of infectious disease and designing immunotherapy. It thus has broad applications to public health and to biodefense. The project will develop a cutting-edge computational tool to model multiple data types on the human immune system, especially to facilitate the understanding of the accumulated data in NIH ImmPort data repository. A particular application will be the role of heme biosynthesis in the immune system. The resulting software tools will be provided freely to NIH and to the broader community.
| Gardinassi, Luiz G; Arévalo-Herrera, Myriam; Herrera, Sócrates et al. (2018) Integrative metabolomics and transcriptomics signatures of clinical tolerance to Plasmodium vivax reveal activation of innate cell immunity and T cell signaling. Redox Biol 17:158-170 |
