Illuminating Dark Proteins using Reactome Pathways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diseases are often the consequence of proteins or protein complexes that are non-functional or that function improperly. An active area of research has focused on the identification of molecules that can interact with defective proteins and restore their function. While 22% percent of human proteins are estimated to be druggable, less than fifteen percent are targeted by FDA-approved drugs, and the vast majority of untargeted proteins are understudied or so-called "dark" proteins. Elucidation of the function of these dark proteins, particularly those in commonly drug-targeted protein families, may offer therapeutic opportunities for many diseases. Reactome is the most comprehensive, open-access pathway knowledgebase covering 2585 pathways and including 14246 reactions, 11088 proteins, 13984 complexes, and 1093 drugs. Placing dark proteins in the context of Reactome pathways provides a framework of reference for these proteins facilitating the generation of hypotheses for experimental biologists to develop targeted experiments, unravel the potential functions of these proteins, and then design drugs to manipulate them. To this end, we have trained a random forest with 106 protein/gene pairwise features collected from multiple resources to predict functional interactions between dark proteins and proteins annotated in Reactome and then developed three scores to measure the interactions between dark proteins and Reactome pathways based on enrichment analysis and fuzzy logic simulations. Literature evidence via manual checking and systematic NLP-based analysis support predicted interacting pathways for dark proteins. To visualize dark proteins in the context of Reactome pathways, we have also developed a new website, idg.reactome.org, by extending the Reactome web application with new features illustrating these proteins together with tissue-specific protein and gene expression levels and drug interactions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".