Gene Ontology and KEGG Enrichment Analyses of Genes Related to Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Abstract EN

Identifying disease genes is one of the most important topics in biomedicine and may facilitate studies on the mechanisms underlying disease.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a serious eye disease; it typically affects older adults and results in a loss of vision due to retina damage.

In this study, we attempt to develop an effective method for distinguishing AMD-related genes.

Gene ontology and KEGG enrichment analyses of known AMD-related genes were performed, and a classification system was established.

In detail, each gene was encoded into a vector by extracting enrichment scores of the gene set, including it and its direct neighbors in STRING, and gene ontology terms or KEGG pathways.

Then certain feature-selection methods, including minimum redundancy maximum relevance and incremental feature selection, were adopted to extract key features for the classification system.

As a result, 720 GO terms and 11 KEGG pathways were deemed the most important factors for predicting AMD-related genes.