Prioritizing Disease Genes and Understanding Disease Pathways

Genetic factors play a major role in the etiology of many human diseases. Genome-wide experimental methods produce an increasing number of genes associated with such diseases. This article introduces data sources, bioinformatics tools, and computational methods for prioritizing disease candidate genes and identifying disease pathways. The main strategy is to examine the similarity among the candidate genes and known disease genes at the functional level. The authors review different similarity measures and prevailing methods for integrating results from different functional aspects. The authors hope this article will help advocate many useful resources that the researchers can use to investigate diseases of their interest.