NORDic: a Network-Oriented package for the Repurposing of Drugs

Clémence Réda

Abstract:

Genes, proteins and messenger RNAs are shown to interact on each other in order to modulate gene activity. Gene regulatory networks, which are graphs connecting biological entities according to their known regulatory interactions, are useful models that enable a better understanding of those regulatory mechanisms (Karlebach & Shamir, 2008).
In particular, one type of gene regulatory networks, called Boolean networks, allows the definition of so-called regulatory functions (Kauffman, 1969; Thomas, 1973). Those functions are specific to each node in the graph, and determine the activity of this node according to its regulators. Those functions are defined on the Boolean domain (True or False), meaning that we only consider binary gene activities. Subsequently, studying this type of networks as a dynamical system remains rather tractable (Moon et al., 2022). The potential applications are numerous. Taking into account network dynamics should improve tools originally developed using non Boolean networks for the identification of interesting biomarkers (Nicolle et al., 2015) or drug repurposing.