Graphical exploration and topological analysis

The Disease Maps Project is designed as a large-scale community effort. It is a network of groups that work together in order to better understand disease mechanisms. The project exchanges best practices, share information, develop tools to make it easier for all the involved groups to achieve their goals.

Here we share resources and best practices to develop a disease map for COVID-19. The project is progressing as a broad community-driven effort. We aim to establish a knowledge repository on virus-host interaction mechanisms specific to the SARS-CoV-2. The COVID-19 Disease Map is an assembly of molecular interaction diagrams established based on literature evidence.

To allow detailed visual analysis of the overall system and its parts, we used a customised version of our Vanted extension LMME (Large Metabolic Model Explorer) to construct an overview graph, showing one node per pathway and the respective interconnecting species. We performed a comprehensive analysis of node centralities on two levels: on the level of the individual pathway networks as well as on the level of an aggregated network which is composed of the individual networks. This allows ...