User:Shikang Liu/sandbox

Human disease network is a network of human disorders and diseases with reference to their genetic origins or other features. More specifically, it is the map of human diseases associations which correlate mostly by common genes. For example, in a human disease network, two diseases are linked if they share at least one associated gene. A paradigm human disease network usually derives from bipartite networks which consist of both phenotype and genotype information.

History
In 2007, Goh et al. constructed a disease-gene bipartite graph using information from OMIM database and termed human disease network. In 2009, Barrenas et al. derived complex disease-gene network using GWAs (Genome Wide Association studies). At the same year, Hidalgo et al. built human phenotypeic disease networks in which diseases are linked according to their comorbidity using medical data from hospitals. In 2011, Cusick et al. summarized studies on genotype-phenotype associations in cellular context.

Properties of human disease network
A holistic human disease network shows scale-free property. The degree distribution follows a power law suggesting that a few diseases, which are hubs, link to a large number of diseases, whereas most diseases have few links to other diseases. Such network also shows a clustering tendency by disease class.