Transducer Cascades for Biological Literature-Based Discovery

Abstract

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) control the response of cells to many signals, and as such, are involved in most cellular processes. As membrane receptors, they are accessible at the surface of the cell. GPCRs are also the largest family of membrane receptors, with more than 800 representatives in mammal genomes. For this reason, they are ideal targets for drugs. Although about one third of approved drugs target GPCRs, only about 16% of GPCRs are targeted by drugs. One of the difficulties comes from the lack of knowledge on the intra-cellular events triggered by these molecules. In the last two decades, scientists have started mapping the signaling networks triggered by GPCRs. However, it soon appeared that the system is very complex, which led to the publication of more than 320,000 scientific papers. Clearly, a human cannot take into account such massive sources of information. These papers represent a mine of information about both ontological knowledge and experimental results related to GPCRs, which have to be exploited in order to build signaling networks. The ABLISS project aims at the automatic building of GPCRs networks using automated deductive reasoning, allowing to integrate all available data. Therefore, we processed the automatic extraction of network information from the literature using Natural Language Processing (NLP). We mainly focused on the experimental results about GPCRs reported in the scientific papers, as so far there is no source gathering all these experimental results. We designed a relational database in order to make them available to the scientific community later. After introducing the more general objectives of the ABLISS project, we describe the formalism in detail. We then explain the NLP program using the finite state methods (Unitex graph cascades) we implemented and discuss the extracted facts obtained. Finally, we present the design of the relational database that stores the facts extracted from the selected papers.

Keywords

• literature-based discovery
• Finite State Methods
• transducer cascades
• Unitex
• database design
• automated deductive reasoning