Correlation guided Network Integration (CoNI) reveals novel genetic regulators of hepatic metabolism

ABSTRACT The steadily increasing amount of newly generated omics data of various types from genomics to metabolomics is a chance and a challenge to systems biology. To fully use its potential, one key is the meaningful integration of different types of omics. We here present a fully unsupervised and versatile correlation-based method, termed Correlation guided Network Integration (CoNI), to integrate multi-omics data into a hypergraph structure that allows for identification of effective regulators. Our approach further unravels single transcripts mapped to specific densely connected metabolic sub-graphs or pathways. By applying our method on transcriptomics and metabolomics data from murine livers under standard chow or high-fat-diet, we isolated eleven genes with a regulatory effect on hepatic metabolism. Subsequent in vitro and ex vivo experiments in human liver cells and human obtained liver biopsies validated seven candidates including INHBE and COBLL1 , to alter lipid metabolism and to correlate with diabetes related traits such as overweight, hepatic fat content and insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). Last, we successfully applied our methods to an independent data-set to confirm its versatile and transferable character.