Generation and Analysis of Large-Scale Data-Driven Mycobacterium tuberculosis Functional Networks for Drug Target Identification.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Bioinformatics Volume 2011, Article ID 801478, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2011/801478 Research Article Generation and Analysis of Large-Scale Data-Driven Mycobacterium tuberculosis Functional Networks for Drug Target Identification Gaston K. Mazandu and Nicola J. Mulder Computational Biology Group, Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa Correspondence should be addressed to Nicola J. Mulder, nicola.mulder@uct.ac.za Received 5 May 2011; Accepted 28 August 2011 Academic Editor: Alvis Brazma Copyright © 2011 G. K. Mazandu and N. J. Mulder. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Technological developments in large-scale biological experiments, coupled with bioinformatics tools, have opened the doors to computational approaches for the global analysis of whole genomes. This has provided the opportunity to look at genes within their context in the cell. The integration of vast amounts of data generated by these technologies provides a strategy for identifying potential drug targets within microbial pathogens, the causative agents of infectious diseases. As proteins are druggable targets, functional interaction networks between proteins are used to identify proteins essential to the survival, growth, and virulence of these microbial pathogens. Here we have integrated functional genomics data to generate functional interaction networks between Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins and carried out computational analyses to dissect the functional in