Chunk #47 — 4. ACHIEVING A SYSTEMS-BASED APPROACH TO STUDYING AD — 4.4 Interpreting Systems-based Analysis of AD: The Need for Alcohol-focused Ontologies
approaches to AD and other complex diseases appear to be data integration, analysis, and interpretation. Integrating genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and most eventually environmental effects into a format that will be applicable to AD requires extensive mining of bioinformatic databases with the intent to build a framework upon evidence from model organisms like drosophila, mouse, and simple organisms. This knowledge base will be essential to modeling specific aspects of AD because functional experiments in these animals will be the key to unlocking epistatic processes in different environmental situations (as best studied under controlled conditions using pre-clinical models). Notably, data sharing across genetic, proteomic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic databases are already underway, leaving the interpretation of systems-based studies as the latest challenge in genetics research; unfortunately, environmental databases that connect environmental factors to AD using replicable high-throughput techniques are still in their infancy. Since graph-based models will be particularly useful in modeling complex biological systems, systems-genetics models of AD will most likely resemble a collection of nodes, which would represent genes and/or proteins, and edges that represent the relationship between nodes and the means by which susceptibility to disease is transmitted through the system (Figure 2). Given the biology of AD, formal ontologies
