Disease-Gene Association Using a Genetic Algorithm

Understanding the relationship between genetic diseases and the genes associated with them is an important problem regarding human health. The vast amount of data created from a large number of high-throughput experiments performed in the last few years has resulted in an unprecedented growth in computational methods to tackle the disease-gene association problem. Nowadays, it is clear that many of genetic diseases are not consequence of defects in a single gene. Instead, the disease phenotype is a reflection of various genetic components interacting in a complex network. In fact, most of genetic diseases occur as a result of various genes working in sync with each other in a single or several biological module (s). Using a genetic algorithm, we have devised a computational approach for disease-gene association. As a proof of concept, we apply this method to the problem of identifying genes involved in breast cancer.