Cognitive ageing journal club

Speaker: Grant Robertson (Informatics)

Title: A systems biology approach to molecular cognition

Abstract: Using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis to analyse GWAS data from the Cognitive Ageing Genetics in England and Scotland (CAGES) consortium, Hill et al. showed an enriched association for fluid cognitive ability for the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor complex proteins (NMDA), part of the synaptic proteome1.

The synaptic proteome is a complex biological network and functional subgroups can be extracted using community detection algorithms. Previous work has shown that communities discovered in the NRC/MASC (186 proteins) complex showed evidence of functional specialisation and association with particular neuropsychiatric disorders2.

I will show how these algorithms can be used to discover sets of genes sharing a common network topology in a large (4000 protein) synaptic interaction graph and how these sets can be used with Gene Set Enrichment Analysis to analyse GWAS data for complex traits such as cognitive ability.

Contact

The seminars are organised by members of the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology. For further information or to join the distribution list, please email Dr Stuart Ritchie.

Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology

Dr Stuart Ritchie