Integrated Analysis Identifies Interaction Patterns between Small Molecules and Pathways

Figure 1

Flow chart for the construction of a link map between molecules and their target pathways. First, the gene expression profiles for each cancer were obtained from both tumours and adjacent normal tissues and differentially expressed genes were screened. Second, enriched pathways were obtained by enriching differentially expressed genes into KEGG pathways. Third, differential genes in each enriched pathway were input into Connectivity Map to identify the small molecules related to each pathway. Finally, link map between small molecules and pathways (the M-P link map) was constructed based on the significance level of their association. In the background grid, the corresponding cell is coloured grey if small molecules significantly link to the pathway in the M-P link map, while the cell was white if such links did not exist. The front network was a visualisation of the background grid in which each pathway node was represented by a green rectangle, while each molecule node was represented by a red circle. The node size increased with the number of first-order neighbours in the link map.