Title:Understanding Effects of Psychological Stress on Physiology and Disease Through Human Stressome - An Integral Algorithm
Volume: 11
Issue: 2
Author(s): Sushri Priyadarshini and Palok Aich
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Disease, gene networking, meta-analysis, physiology, psychological stress.
Abstract: Psychological stress perturbs normal physiological function or homeostasis. Restoration of
normalcy demands more supply of energy. A physiological mechanism via activated stress response
system is aimed at providing quick energy to deal with such emergency situations. If stress response
system remains activated for longer period, maintaining physiological homeostasis becomes difficult
because of higher demand for energy which eventually leads to increased susceptibility to infection or
disease. Although there are reports, associating psychological stress with physiological functions and
diseases, a clear understanding of mechanism of stress manifestation is yet to be established. In order
to facilitate extensive exploration and prediction of possible mechanisms, integration of molecular (gene-level) data
pertaining to psychological stress, physiological processes and stress-associated diseases is needed. We report power of
text-mining in combination with our data-integration methods and mathematical formulation to develop integrated geneassociation
networks. These networks can be analyzed to gain holistic insights into the relationship between psychological
stress-associated genes (stressome) and related physiological functions and diseases. We built the human psychostressome
networks to understand and predict pathways and candidate genes responsible for perturbing balance among
various physiological functions and disease manifestation. Using the current methodology, we were able to predict
involvement of serotonin receptors and uridine 5'-diphospho-glucuronosyltransferases in mediating effects of
psychological stress.
