SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012 1541-1672/12/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE 19
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
Biochemical Data mining
Discovering Inhibition
Pathways for
Protein Kinases
Qingfeng Chen, Guangxi University
Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, La Trobe University
The inhibition
of protein kinase
activity can cause
disease. The authors
present a method
for investigating
inhibitive regulatory
correlations between
kinase isoforms and
physical factors.
several protein kinases that perform key
regulatory tasks, and they constitute one
of the largest and most functionally diverse
gene families. We already know that the hu-
man genome contains about 500 protein
kinase genes.
1
Up to 30 percent of all hu-
man proteins could be related to kinase ac-
tivity, and kinases are known to regulate the
majority of cellular pathways.
The enzyme adenosine monophosphate-
activated protein kinase (AMPK) plays a
role in cellular energy homeostasis, helping
to regulate exercise-induced changes in glu-
cose and lipid metabolism in skeletal mus-
cle.
2
For example, the activation of AMPK
has long-term effects on both gene expres-
sion and protein synthesis, including posi-
tive effects on glucose uptake in the heart
and negative effects on cholesterol synthesis
in the liver.
Research has produced an increasing
amount of data on regulation and signal
transduction pathways. This data is useful
for generating identiable paradigms of cellu-
lar communication. For example, analysis of
kinase regulation data can determine which
protein isoforms are activated or inhibited in
expression as a result of certain endurance ex-
ercises and how they coordinate to perform
complex functions.
2
This analysis requires
both a systematic way to collect valuable reg-
ulatory data from biological experiments and
advanced techniques for data analysis.
Association rule mining is a popular sum-
marization and pattern-extraction approach
to identifying correlations between items in
diverse databases.
3–5
Efforts to analyze bi-
ological databases using association rules
generally focus on positive associations
among gene expression, genetic pathways,
and protein-protein interaction. We have
previously attempted to find positive pat-
terns of AMPK regulation on skeletal mus-
cle,
2
whereas hidden negative (or inhibitive)
patterns have been largely overlooked. Re-
cently, increasing evidence has suggested
that the inhibitory activity of protein ki-
nases is a frequent cause of disease, an in-
sight that offers good prospects for treat-
ment. Consequently, researchers have begun
to investigate negative associations as well
as positive associations.
3,6
In our opinion,
A
particular class of kinases (enzymes that add phosphate groups to, or
phosphorylate, organic molecules), protein kinases, get activated when
the body is consuming energy (such as during exercise) and play an impor-
tant role in multiple metabolic and cellular pathways. Researchers have found
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