Finding Functionally Related Genes by Local and Global Analysis of MEDLINE Abstracts

Abstract

Discovery of biological relationships between genes is one of the keys to understanding the complex functional nature of the human genome. Currently, most of the knowledge about interrelating genes are found in immense amounts of various biomedical literature. Hence, extraction of biological contexts occurring in free text represents a valuable tool in gaining knowledge about gene interactions. We present a textual analysis of documents associated with pairs of genes, and describe how this approach can be used to discover and annotate functional relationships among genes. A study on a subset of human genes show that our analysis tool can act as a ranking mechanism for sets of genes based on their functional relatedness.