RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Dysregulated mechanisms underlying Duchenne

Background: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is an X-linked recessive disorder with its primary insult on the skeletal muscle. Severe muscle wasting, chronic inflammation and fibrosis characterize dystrophic muscle. Here we identify dysregulated pathways in DMD utilizing a co-expression network approach as described in Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis (WGCNA). Specifically, we utilize WGCNA’s “preservation ” statistics to identify gene modules that exhibit a weak conservation of network topology within healthy and dystrophic networks. Preservation statistics rank modules based on their topological metrics such as node density, connectivity and separability between networks. Methods: Raw data for DMD was downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus (GSE6011) and suitably preprocessed. Co-expression networks for each condition (healthy and dystrophic) were generated using the WGCNA library in R. Preservation of healthy network edges was evaluated with respect to dystrophic muscle and vice versa using WGCNA. Highly exclusive gene pairs for each of the low preserved modules within both networks were also determined using a specificity measure. Results: A total of 11 and 10 co-expressed modules were identified in the networks generated from 13 healthy and 23 dystrophic samples respectively. 5 out of the 11, and 4 out of the 10 modules were identified as exhibiting none-to