Biblio-MetReS for user-friendly mining of genes and biological processes in scientific documents

Abstract

One way to initiate the reconstruction of molecular circuits is by using automated text-mining techniques. Developing more efficient methods for such reconstruction is a topic of active research, and those methods are typically included by bioinfor- maticians in pipelines used to mine and curate large literature datasets. Nevertheless, experimental biologists have a limited number of available user-friendly tools that use text-mining for network reconstruction and require no programming skills to use. One of these tools is Biblio-MetReS. Originally, this tool permitted an on-the-fly analysis of documents contained in a number of web-based literature databases to identify co-occurrence of proteins/genes. This approach ensured results that were always up-to-date with the latest live version of the databases. However, this `up-to- dateness' came at the cost of large execution times. Here we report an evolution of the application Biblio-MetReS that permits constructing co-occurrence networks for genes, GO processes, Pathways, or any combination of the three types of entities and graphically represent those entities.We show that the performance of Biblio- MetReS in identifying gene co-occurrence is as least as good as that of other com- parable applications (STRING and iHOP). In addition, we also show that the iden- tification of GO processes is on par to that reported in the latest BioCreAtIvE chal- lenge. Finally, we also report the implementation of a new strategy that combines on-the-fly analysis of new documents with preprocessed information from docu- ments that were encountered in previous analyses. This combination simultaneously decreases program run time and maintains `up-to-dateness' of the results.

RA was partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN, Spain through grant BFU2010-17704). FS was partially funded by the MICINN, with grants TIN2011-28689-C02-02. The authors are members of the research groups 2009SGR809 and 2009SGR145, funded by the “Generalitat de Catalunya”. AU is funded by a Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR) PhD fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.