Automating the PathLinker app for Cytoscape

Introduction

PathLinker is an algorithm that automates the reconstruction of any human signaling pathway by connecting the receptors and transcription factors (TFs) in that pathway through a physical and regulatory interaction network¹. In a comprehensive quantitative evaluation on NetPath pathways, PathLinker achieved higher reconstruction accuracy than several other state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, PathLinker’s novel prediction that the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), an ion-channel receptor, is involved in the Wnt pathway was experimentally validated¹. In general, PathLinker can be used to connect any set of sources to any set of targets in a given network.

The PathLinker app for Cytoscape is an implementation of this algorithm. The PathLinker app² was first released in the middle of December 2015. While it is possible to use the PathLinker app in conjunction with other Cytoscape apps, it can be cumbersome to create such workflows using the Cytoscape user interface. It is also challenging to reproduce the results of these workflows.

Here we present an CyREST-based API that allows users to incorporate PathLinker algorithms into their own software pipelines. The PathLinker application programming interface (API) will facilitate automated analysis of complex networks in reproducible workflows, including in conjunction with other CyREST enabled Cytoscape apps³.

Methods

Operation

The PathLinker API is accessible directly through the Swagger user interface within Cytoscape or by using any REST-enabled client. Note that users must have installed v1.4 of the PathLinker app and Cytoscape v3.6.0 or higher. Moreover, an instance of Cytoscape must be running on the user’s computer. In the “Use Cases” section, we describe a sample workflow using py2cytoscape and provide an example Jupyter Notebook.

As shown in Figure 2, the PathLinker API provides two POST functions, “/pathlinker/v1/currentView/run” and “/pathlinker/v1/networkSUID/run”, which run PathLinker on the currently selected network and on the given networkSUID respectively. Both functions send user-selected source nodes and target nodes and a set of parameters to the PathLinker Cytoscape app.

The app computes the k shortest simple (loopless) paths that connect any source to any target in the network specified in the POST function, generates a subnetwork that contains these paths and a view of this subnetwork, creates a table in the Result Panel that contains these paths (See Figure 3b), and adds a “path rank” column to the Edge Table that contains the rank of the first path in which each edge appears. The POST functions return the computed paths, the SUIDs of the subnetwork and subnetwork view, and the name of the “path rank” column created by the app.

We summarize the parameters of the API functions and their outputs below.

API parameters

• The API functions have the same set of parameters as the user can set in the user interface of the PathLinker app (see Figure 1a and Figure 1b). The user should provide these parameters in JSON format, whether they use the Swagger user interface or invoke the PathLinker API in code or via external tools. Table 1 contains an overview of the parameters, their types and a brief description. For a detailed description of the parameters, please see the Swagger documentation or documentation of the PathLinker app.

Figure 1. Comparison of PathLinker parameters in the app and in the API.

Figure 2. PathLinker application programming interface (API) functions shown in the Swagger user interface.

Figure 3. Illustration of the first use case.

Table 1. PathLinker application programming interface (API) parameters.

The last column records whether an equivalent option is present in the user interface of the PathLinker app. T/F - True/False.

Parameter	Type	Description	Present in UI
sources	String	Node names separated by spaces	✓
targets	String	Node names separated by spaces	✓
k	Integer	Number of paths to compute	✓
edgeWeightType	String	UNWEIGHTED, ADDITIVE, or PROBABILITIES	✓
edgePenalty	Integer	Penalize low-weight paths with many edges	✓
edgeWeightColumnName	String	Name of the Edge Table column that contains the edge weights	✓
allowSourcesTargetsInPaths	T/F	Allow sources and targets to be intermediate nodes in paths	✓
includeTiedPaths	T/F	Include more than k paths if their score equals the kth path’s score	✓
treatNetworkAsUndirected	T/F	Ignore directionality when computing paths	✓
skipSubnetworkGeneration	T/F	Return only the k shortest paths

API Output

• The PathLinker API functions returns a response in JSON format with the following fields:

• subnetworkSUID: The SUID of the subnetwork created in Cytoscape.

• subnetworkViewSUID: The SUID of the subnetwork view created in Cytoscape.

• pathRankColumnName: The name of the edge column created in the subnetwork’s edge table containing the rank of the first path in which each edge appears. The user can programmatically access this table using the CyREST API.

• paths: The list of paths generated by the algorithm sorted by the path rank. This list contains the same information as the result table in the “Result Panel” created by the PathLinker app. Each entry in the list contains the following fields that describe a path:

  • rank: The rank of the path. For example, “100” for the 100th shortest path.

  • score: The total weight of the edges in the path.

  • nodeList: The list of nodes in the path. Each element in this list appears in the “name” column in the node table of the network provided as input to PathLinker. If multiple paths have the same score, then we order them lexicographically by their node lists.

• If the user sets skipSubnetworkGeneration to true in the input to the API functions, then the PathLinker app does not generate the subnetwork and its view. Therefore, the API output will not contain the first three attributes, i.e., subnetworkSUID, subnetworkViewSUID, and pathRankColumnName.

• The functions in the PathLinker API implement careful checks of the input. The function return the following error codes to provide meaningful feedback to the user:

• 400: Invalid user input. The JSON response lists all faulty input along with a reason why the input is correct, allowing the user to correct all the errors at the same time.

• 404: Current network or network with the given SUID does not exist.

• 422: No paths found. This error message indicates that PathLinker could not find any path connecting the source(s) to the target(s) in the given network. This error can occur if every source is disconnected from every target.

Use cases

We provide two Jupyter Notebooks that illustrate the PathLinker API. The first notebook implements a use case on a simple network with 11 nodes and 13 edges, shown in Figure 3a. The notebook shows how to use Python and the py2cytoscape library to 1) load this network into Cytoscape, 2) call the PathLinker API with a set of parameters (Figure 1), 3) view the computed paths and subnetwork, and 4) save the paths and/or subnetwork image to a file. The API function call in the notebook asks PathLinker to find the two shortest paths connecting “a” to “e” or to “h” while treating the network as undirected. It also asks PathLinker to return more than two paths if their scores are tied with the second path.

Even though we set k = 2, PathLinker returned three paths; Figure 3b shows the subnetwork containing these paths. PathLinker did so because we used the “Include tied paths” option, and the second and third path both had a score of three (they contain three edges each). In this example, we used the “Treat network as undirected” option because even though the edges in the network were intended to be undirected, py2cytoscape treats networks imported from the Python NetworkX package as directed.

The second notebook implements a more complex example that we presented in the paper describing the PathLinker app². Here, we used PathLinker to compute and analyze a network of interactions connecting proteins that are perturbed by the drug Lovastatin. The PathLinker API functions now allow us to automate this use case enabling fast reproduction of the results, as shown in the Jupyter Notebook.

Summary

The subnetwork returned by the PathLinker API is another network in the current Cytoscape session. Hence, this network is amenable for analysis by other CyREST APIs and/or Cytoscape apps. Some examples include calling the Diffusion app’s API on the subnetwork, or modifying the subnetwork using standard CyREST API calls such as adding visual styles to the subnetwork or calling different layout algorithms.

In the near future, we plan to provide users more freedom in determining which column in the Node Table should act as the input for source and target fields. We will also implement additional sub-network generation algorithms. We will implement these new features in parallel in the PathLinker app and in the REST API.

We hope that these additions will increase making PathLinker a method of choice in the network biology community.

Data availability

All data underlying the results are available as part of the article and no additional source data are required.

Software availability

Software available from:http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/pathlinker

The Cytoscape app source code and sample Jupyter Notebooks are available at https://github.com/Murali-group/PathLinker-Cytoscape

Archived source code as at time of publication: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1252308⁴

License: GNU General Public License version 3