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University of Illinois Theses &amp; Dissertations (ID: 1)
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          <dc:identifier>http://hdl.handle.net/2142/46759</dc:identifier>
          <dc:language>en</dc:language>
          <dc:rights>Copyright 2013 Yuliang Wang</dc:rights>
          <dc:subject>gene expression data analysis</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>disease molecular signatures</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>protein interaction networks</dc:subject>
          <dc:contributor>Price, Nathan D.</dc:contributor>
          <dc:contributor>Price, Nathan D.</dc:contributor>
          <dc:contributor>Zhao, Huimin</dc:contributor>
          <dc:contributor>Rao, Christopher V.</dc:contributor>
          <dc:contributor>Ma, Jian</dc:contributor>
          <dc:creator>Wang, Yuliang</dc:creator>
          <dc:date>2014-01-16T18:01:30Z</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2014-01-16T18:01:30Z</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2013-12</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2014-01-16T18:01:30Z</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2013-12</dc:date>
          <dc:description>The advent of high throughput technologies has enabled large-scale measurements of the genome,
transcriptome, proteome and metabolome of tissues samples, serum and even single cells.
Additionally, prior biological knowledge is increasingly curated into accessible databases and
reconstructed into computable models. My research aims to integrate high throughput data and prior
knowledge to improve disease diagnosis and our understanding of biological systems, by leveraging
the power of both statistical learning and mechanistic modeling approaches.
The first part of my Ph.D. work is to apply increasingly mechanistic biological constraints in in the
analysis of high throughput gene expression data to identify molecular signatures of disease
phenotypes. Chapter 2 discusses the statistical issues and recommended steps to generate accurate and
reproducible molecular signatures. Chapter 3 presents a new computational method that uses the
relative expression level of interacting gene pairs as accurate molecular signatures. By incorporating
prior knowledge about the relations between genes, this method increases molecular signature
reproducibility compared with previous methods.
Metabolic networks reconstructed from known reaction stoichiometry and gene-protein-reaction
associations provide a mechanistic context to analyze gene expression data. In Chapter 4, I developed
a new analysis pipeline that identified perturbations at metabolic branch points (i.e., structures where
two reactions consume the same metabolite). Different phenotypes (e.g., cancer v.s. normal) can be
accurately distinguished by transcriptional changes at metabolic branch points. Combining reaction
expression state (high/low), mass conservation and thermodynamic constraints, I identified additional
perturbed branch point reaction pairs that are not apparent from expression data alone.
The second part of my PhD work is to contextualize and refine prior knowledge by integration with
context-specific high throughput data. In Chapter 5, I developed a novel computational method
mCADRE to reconstruct tissue-specific metabolic models. This method can use transcriptomic,
proteomic and metabolomics data to infer the metabolic network of a given tissue or cell type. This
iii
method can be viewed as using tissue-specific omic data to refine and contextualize prior knowledge
of metabolism. Using this new method, I reconstructed genome-scale metabolic models for 126
human tissues, providing a tissue-specific encyclopedia of metabolism. In Chapter 6, I applied
mCADRE to reconstruct metabolic networks of commonly used breast cancer cell lines. Systematic
comparison of model prediction and experimental results revealed different types of inconsistencies
that call for further model curation and the development of new modeling approaches.</dc:description>
          <dc:subject>metabolic networks</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>automated network reconstruction</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>constraint-based analysis</dc:subject>
          <dc:title>Integrating statistical and mechanistic modeling to analyze disease omic data</dc:title>
          <dc:type>text</dc:type>
          <degree>
            <department>Chemical &amp; Biomolecular Engr</department>
            <departmentCode>1687</departmentCode>
            <discipline>Chemical Engineering</discipline>
            <disciplineCode>0300</disciplineCode>
            <grantor>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</grantor>
            <level>Dissertation</level>
            <name>Ph.D.</name>
            <program>PHD:Chemical Engineering -UIUC</program>
            <programCode>10KS0300PHD</programCode>
          </degree>
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