The analysis of functional modules in primary cardiomyopathies

Cardiomyopathies are a group of genetically heterogeneous myocardial diseases. In primary cardiomyopathies, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) are usually autosomal dominant inherited. Network modules are often used to analyze biological insights of some diseases. In this article, we firstly collected pathogenic proteins of HCM and DCM from the PubMed database using the Chi-square test. Secondly, we searched protein interactions of these pathogenic proteins with experimental evidence using the STRING database. Then, we constructed a weighted protein interaction network calculated by two measure sets. Functional modules were mined from the network using Markov clustering. Modules obtained using weights from the second measure set were more related with these diseases after comparison and functional enrichment analysis. It was found that gM11 and gM124 were related with both diseases, gM37 was a HCM-specific module, and six modules were DCM-specific. Finally, we used text-mining to verify the relationships between genes in these modules and diseases. Disease mechanisms of HCM and DCM could be explored by these functional modules and their genes.