Journal of Health & Medical Informatics

At birth, each individual is colonized by different microbes (bacteria, viruses, Eukaryotes and Archaea) composing the MICROBIOTA. It represents a group of organisms with whom the host establishes a continuous and constant relationship from which they both benefit.

Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) represents the complex interaction between Transcription Factors (TFs) and other genes with time delays. They are important in the working of the cell. Learning GRN is an important first step towards understanding the working of the cell and consequently curing diseases related to malfunctioning of the cell. One significant problem in learning GRN is that the available time series expression data is still limited compared to the network size. To alleviate this problem, besides using multiple expression replicates, we propose to decompose large network into small subnetwork without prior knowledge. Our algorithm first infers an initial GRN using CLINDE, then decomposes it into possibly overlapping subnetworks, then infers each subnetwork by either CLINDE or DD-lasso and finally merges the subnetworks. We have tested this algorithm on synthetic data of many networks with 500 and 1000 genes. We have also tested on real data on 41 human TF regulatory networks. Results show that our proposed algorithm does improve the GRN learning performance of using either CLINDE or DD-lasso alone on the large network.

Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition caused by body reaction to gluten. It affects 1:100 people. Common symptoms in children include loose stools, abdominal pain and faltering growth, poor appetite, bloating of abdomen and mood changes. Dermatitis Herpetiformis (DH) is the skin manifestation of coeliac disease affecting 1:3300 people. Most commonly DH affects people aged 50-69 years and is relatively uncommon in school aged children; especially as an early manifestation of coeliac disease. We present the case of a six year old child who had troublesome persistent itchy blistering rash as the initial manifestation of childhood coeliac disease, that was formally diagnosed several years later, when he developed abdominal symptoms. This is a unique rare presentation in this age group.