Biological research is expanding enormously in its ability to decipher complex systems. This ability derives from the expanded power to incorporate diverse and complementary data types and to inject prior understanding of biological principles.
Agilent Technologies promotes its Integrated Biology approach, which combines prior biological knowledge with the integration of complementary data layers from genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. This strategy aims to reduce noise and increase the statistical power of omics studies, allowing researchers to identify meaningful correlations that single-omics approaches might miss.
The document illustrates this approach with case studies, such as Arun Sreekumar's work on pancreatic cancer biomarkers and Akhilesh Pandey's research on sulforaphane. It highlights the GeneSpring bioinformatics software suite, specifically the Pathway Architect (PA) module, as a tool that simplifies joint analysis of multi-omics data and maps differentially expressed entities onto known pathways.
The study identified 56 proteins that are significantly upregulated when compared to benign samples.
A one-sided Fisher's exact test was used, resulting in a p-value of 0.00025.
SFN treatment resulted in 6,378 regulated transcripts while KEAP1 knockdown resulted in 1,710.