Omics Data Analysis of Complex Diseases and Traits

Following the advent of the high-throughput techniques for producing massive omics data, new possibilities and challenges have also emerged in different fields of biology and medicine. Dealing with such data on different scales with different scopes such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, demands appropriate data collection, preprocessing, statistical analysis, interpretation and visualization. The overall goal of this thesis was to conceive omics-related questions in the context of four research titles and to apply a rational choice of the mentioned methods to conduct the study plans to answer them. Paper I asks whether we could propose potentially implicated genes in psoriasis; and tries to answer it using microarray transcriptomics data of psoriasis. Initially, quality control was performed on the microarray dataset and then the Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs) were chosen for mapping to a protein-protein interaction (PPI) database to create a subnetwork of the respective PPI. Using network analysis, genes with higher scores were proposed as potentially relevant to psoriasis and finally, we evaluated the results concerning a gene-disease association database. Paper II asks whether the knockout of two genes followed by a transformation in E. coli could lead to an increase in bacterial growth in two different media; and deals with it through in vitro experiments followed by an in silico analysis of E. coli RNA-seq data. Here, we calculated the pairwise correlations between each target (knockout) gene and the rest of the genes in the RNA-seq dataset. Then, the significantly anti-correlated genes were shown to mainly belong to protein biosynthesis pathways compared to all other background pathways, which might indicate an increase in protein biosynthesis-related genes' transcription levels when there is an absolute decrease (knockout) in each of the target genes. Paper III asks if an anti-bone-resorption drug called Denosumab significa