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The complex web of macromolecular interactions occurring within cells-the interactome-is the backbone of an increasing number of studies, but a clear consensus on the exact structure of this network is still lacking. Different genome-scale maps of human interactome have been obtained through several experimental techniques and functional analyses. Moreover, these maps can be enriched through literature-mining approaches, and different combinations of various 'source' databases have been used in the literature. It is therefore unclear to which extent the various interactomes yield similar results when used in the context of interactome-based approaches in network biology. We compared a comprehensive list of human interactomes on the basis of topology, protein complexes, molecular pathways, pathway cross-talk and disease gene prediction. In a general context of relevant heterogeneity, our study provides a series of qualitative and quantitative parameters that describe the state of the art of human interactomes and guidelines for selecting interactomes in future applications., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Background: Recent comparative studies have brought to our attention how somatic mutation detection from next-generation sequencing data is still an open issue in bioinformatics, because different pipelines result in a low consensus. In this context, it is suggested to integrate results from multiple calling tools, but this operation is not trivial and the burden of merging, comparing, filtering and explaining the results demands appropriate software., Results: We developed isma (integrative somatic mutation analysis), an R package for the integrative analysis of somatic mutations detected by multiple pipelines for matched tumor-normal samples. The package provides a series of functions to quantify the consensus, estimate the variability, underline outliers, integrate evidences from publicly available mutation catalogues and filter sites. We illustrate the capabilities of isma analysing breast cancer somatic mutations generated by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) using four pipelines., Conclusions: Comparing different "points of view" on the same data, isma generates a unique mutation catalogue and a series of reports that underline common patterns, variability, as well as sites already catalogued by other studies (e.g. TCGA), so as to design and apply filtering strategies to screen more reliable sites. The package is available for non-commercial users at the URL https://www.itb.cnr.it/isma .

Background: The capability of correlating specific genotypes with human diseases is a complex issue in spite of all advantages arisen from high-throughput technologies, such as Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). New tools for genetic variants interpretation and for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) prioritization are actually needed. Given a list of the most relevant SNPs statistically associated to a specific pathology as result of a genotype study, a critical issue is the identification of genes that are effectively related to the disease by re-scoring the importance of the identified genetic variations. Vice versa, given a list of genes, it can be of great importance to predict which SNPs can be involved in the onset of a particular disease, in order to focus the research on their effects., Results: We propose a new bioinformatics approach to support biological data mining in the analysis and interpretation of SNPs associated to pathologies. This system can be employed to design custom genotyping chips for disease-oriented studies and to re-score GWAS results. The proposed method relies (1) on the data integration of public resources using a gene-centric database design, (2) on the evaluation of a set of static biomolecular annotations, defined as features, and (3) on the SNP scoring function, which computes SNP scores using parameters and weights set by users. We employed a machine learning classifier to set default feature weights and an ontological annotation layer to enable the enrichment of the input gene set. We implemented our method as a web tool called SNPranker 2.0 (http://www.itb.cnr.it/snpranker), improving our first published release of this system. A user-friendly interface allows the input of a list of genes, SNPs or a biological process, and to customize the features set with relative weights. As result, SNPranker 2.0 returns a list of SNPs, localized within input and ontologically enriched genes, combined with their prioritization scores., Conclusions: Different databases and resources are already available for SNPs annotation, but they do not prioritize or re-score SNPs relying on a-priori biomolecular knowledge. SNPranker 2.0 attempts to fill this gap through a user-friendly integrated web resource. End users, such as researchers in medical genetics and epidemiology, may find in SNPranker 2.0 a new tool for data mining and interpretation able to support SNPs analysis. Possible scenarios are GWAS data re-scoring, SNPs selection for custom genotyping arrays and SNPs/diseases association studies.

The identification of genes and SNPs involved in human diseases remains a challenge. Many public resources, databases and applications, collect biological data and perform annotations, increasing the global biological knowledge. The need of SNPs prioritization is emerging with the development of new high-throughput genotyping technologies, which allow to develop customized disease-oriented chips. Therefore, given a list of genes related to a specific biological process or disease as input, a crucial issue is finding the most relevant SNPs to analyse. The selection of these SNPs may rely on the relevant a-priori knowledge of biomolecular features characterising all the annotated SNPs and genes of the provided list. The bioinformatics approach described here allows to retrieve a ranked list of significant SNPs from a set of input genes, such as candidate genes associated with a specific disease. The system enriches the genes set by including other genes, associated to the original ones by ontological similarity evaluation. The proposed method relies on the integration of data from public resources in a vertical perspective (from genomics to systems biology data), the evaluation of features from biomolecular knowledge, the computation of partial scores for SNPs and finally their ranking, relying on their global score. Our approach has been implemented into a web based tool called SNPRanker, which is accessible through at the URL http://www.itb.cnr.it/snpranker . An interesting application of the presented system is the prioritisation of SNPs related to genes involved in specific pathologies, in order to produce custom arrays.