Network Analysis in Systems Biology

In the 'Gene Set Enrichment and Network Analyses' module the emphasis is on tools developed by the Ma'ayan Laboratory to analyze gene sets. Several tools will be discussed including: Enrichr, GEO2Enrichr, Expression2Kinases and DrugPairSeeker. In addition, one lecture will be devoted to a method we call enrichment vector clustering we developed, and two lectures will describe the popular gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) method and an improved method we developed called principal angle enrichment analysis (PAEA).

A set of lectures in the 'Deep Sequencing Data Processing and Analysis' module will cover the basic steps and popular pipelines to analyze RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data going from the raw data to gene lists to figures. These lectures also cover UNIX/Linux commands and some programming elements of R, a popular freely available statistical software. Note that since these lectures were developed and recorded during the Fall of 2013, it is possible that there are better tools that should be used now since the field is rapidly advancing.

This module is devoted to various method of clustering: principal component analysis, self-organizing maps, network-based clustering and hierarchical clustering. The theory behind these methods of analysis are covered in detail, and this is followed by some practical demonstration of the methods for applications using R and MATLAB.

The lectures in the 'Resources for Data Integration' module are about the various types of networks that are typically constructed and analyzed in systems biology and systems pharmacology. These lectures start with the idea of functional association networks (FANs). Following this lecture are several lectures that discuss how to construct FANs from various resources and how to use these networks for analyzing gene lists as well as to construct a puzzle that can be used to connect genomic data with phenotypic data.

The final set of lectures presents the idea of crowdsourcing. MOOCs provide the opportunity to work together on projects that are difficult to complete alone (microtasks) or compete for implementing the best algorithms to solve hard problems (megatasks). You will have the opportunity to participate in various crowdsourcing projects: microtasks and megatasks. These projects are designed specifically for this course.

The final exam consists of multiple choice questions from topics covered in all of modules of the course. Some of the questions may require you to perform some of the analysis methods you learned throughout the course on new datasets.