Autworks: a cross-disease network biology application for Autism and related disorders

Abstract

Abstract Background The genetic etiology of autism is heterogeneous. Multiple disorders share genotypic and phenotypic traits with autism. Network based cross-disorder analysis can aid in the understanding and characterization of the molecular pathology of autism, but there are few tools that enable us to conduct cross-disorder analysis and to visualize the results. Description We have designed Autworks as a web portal to bring together gene interaction and gene-disease association data on autism to enable network construction, visualization, network comparisons with numerous other related neurological conditions and disorders. Users may examine the structure of gene interactions within a set of disorder-associated genes, compare networks of disorder/disease genes with those of other disorders/diseases, and upload their own sets for comparative analysis. Conclusions Autworks is a web application that provides an easy-to-use resource for researchers of varied backgrounds to analyze the autism gene network structure within and between disorders. Availability: http://autworks.hms.harvard.edu/

Keywords

• Autism
• Autistic disorder
• Autism spectrum disorders
• Autism genetics
• Autism genomics
• Network biology
• Network medicine
• Translational bioinformatics
• Protein-protein interactions