NGFNplus is part of the national program of medical genome research and consists of 26 genome research networks. One of the research topics is the investigation of Parkinson's Disease (PD). In this project our research focuses at generating testable hypotheses regarding specific functional associations of PD. To this end, consequences of mutations and differential gene expression are deduced by systematically integrating genomic, transcriptional and protein-protein interaction datasets.

To elucidate downstream effects of SNPs, alternative splicing variants and their implications on PPIs are analyzed. Another systems level analysis will be integrating gene expression datasets with putative regulatory interactions. Finally, SNP datasets, the PPI networks and the gene regulatory networks will be unified, providing a comprehensive set of putative systems level implications towards PD. Thus, our research has the following subgoals:

Inferring putative gene regulatory interactions (genomic and transcriptional level)
Generating PPI networks based on domain specific splice variants (genomic and proteomic level)
Integrating transcriptional and PPI networks with clinical and imaging phenotypes to a mathematical model (genomic, transcriptional and proteomic and phenotypic level)