Razavi et al. Applied Network Science (2019) 4:83 Applied Network Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-019-0200-x RESEARCH Open Access TOPDRIVER: the novel identifier of cancer driver genes in Gastric cancer and Melanoma Seyed Mohammad Razavi1,2, Farzaneh Rami2, Seyede Houri Razavi1,2 and Changiz Eslahchi1,2* *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1Computer Science Department, Nowadays, research has found a strong relationship between genomic status and Mathematical sciences faculty, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, occurrence of disease. Cancer is one of the most common diseases that leads to a high Iran annual mortality rate worldwide, and the disease’s genetic content remains 2School of Biological Sciences, challenging. Detecting driver genes of different cancers could help in early diagnosis Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), and treatment. In this paper, we proposed TOPDRIVER, a network-based algorithm, to Tehran, Iran detect cancer driver genes in cancers. An initial network was constructed by integrating four different omic datasets: HPRD, NCBI, KEGG, and GTEx. This integration created a gene similarity profile that provided a comprehensive perspective of gene interaction in each subtype of cancer and allocated weights to the edges of the network. The vertex scores were calculated using a gene-disease association dataset (DisGeNet) and a molecular functional disease similarity. In this step, the genes network was jagged and faced with a zero-one gap problem. A diffusion kernel was implemented to smooth the vertex scores to overcome this problem. Finally, potential driver genes were extracted according to the topology of the network, genes overall biological functions, and their involvement in cancer pathways.