Abstract
Purpose :
Uveitis is an intraocular inflammation disease, which can cause blindness for both young and middle-aged individuals. In west, 10-15% of the blindness are caused by uveitis. Up to now, its pathological processes are still uncovered, inducing difficulties for designing effective treatments. Identification of genes related to uveitis as complete as possible is an important way to understand its pathological processes.
Methods :
In this study, some possible novel uveitis related genes were discovered using a computational method. To execute the method, we first retrieved known uveitis related genes from the UniprotKB database and references in PubMed, and constructed a large network using protein-protein interaction information reported in STRING. Then, the shortest path algorithm was applied to search possible novel genes based on known genes related to uveitis. To make the obtained genes more reliable, a permutation test was adopted to exclude false positives and the linkages between possible genes and known ones were used to select essential possible genes.
Results :
Twenty-one possible genes were identified by the computational method. They are deemed to be related to uveitis.
Conclusions :
According to the analyses of obtained genes, eleven genes have evidences to be related to uveitis. The rest obtained genes required further validation.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.