GeneCOST: a novel scoring-based prioritization framework for identifying disease causing genes

Bugra Ozer, Mahmut Sağıroğlu, Hüseyin Demirci

Due to the big data produced by next-generation sequencing studies, there is an evident need for methods to extract the valuable information gathered from these experiments. In this work, we propose GeneCOST, a novel scoring based method to evaluate every gene for their disease association. Without any prior filtering and any prior knowledge, we assign a disease likelihood score to each gene in correspondence with their variations. Then, we rank all genes based on frequency, conservation, pedigree and detailed variation information to find out the causative reason of the disease state. We demonstrate the usage of GeneCOST with public and real life Mendelian disease cases including recessive, dominant, compound heterozygous and sporadic models. As a result, we were able to identify causative reason behind the disease state in top rankings of our list, proving that this novel prioritization framework provides a powerful environment for the analysis in genetic disease studies alternative to filtering based approaches. GeneCOST software is freely available at www.igbam.bilgem.tubitak.gov.tr/en/softwares/genecost-en/index.html CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.