Illuminating Dark Proteins using Reactome Pathways
Why this work is in the frame
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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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 it