Desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta computacional para auxiliar na comparação de redes de proteínas

Abstract

Systems Biology is a growing interdisciplinary area due to its importance in analyzing large amounts of data. A very important branch of this area is the study of interactions between proteins, in order to better understand the processes that occur between these systems, seeking crucial information for the development of new treatments and drugs. This interaction of proteins can be represented through networks and the study of these structures involves several areas such as graph theory, discrete mathematics and computational processing. A widely used software in Biology is Cytoscape, which offers several interaction and network analysis operations, but these operations have some restrictions. The objective of this work was the development of a tool that could improve the union, intersection and difference operations between two or more protein networks, analyzing them at the same time through a technique of simplification of networks in data sets, with a focus main in the development of the symmetric difference operation. This tool was implemented in C# to be used via the desktop which, through a graphical interface, allows selecting the text files that contain the protein networks and also selecting the operations to be applied in these networks, offering answers with more information to users and generating as a result, a text file for each operation performed. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]