Inspecting Biological Deregulation, Putative Markers, and Therapeutic Targets for Neurodegenerative Diseases Through...

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a source of valuable information concerning brain disorders. The technical advances of high throughput omics platforms to analyze body fluids can generate a huge amount of data, whose translation of the biological meaning can be a challenge. Several bioinformatics tools have emerged to help handle this data from a systems biology perspective. Herein, we describe a step-by-step tutorial for CSF proteome data analysis in the set of neurodegenerative diseases using: (i) ShinyGO webtool to perform functional enrichment analysis envisioning the characterization of the biological pathways and processes deregulated in neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases; (ii) Cytoscape to map disease-specific proteins based on evidence from proteomics; (iii) DisGeNET to identify the proteins more strongly and more specifically associated with neurodegenerative diseases to date; (iv) STRING to identify putative therapeutic targets through a combined protein-protein interaction and network topological analyses. This step-by-step guide might help researchers to better characterize disease pathogenesis and to identify putative disease biomarkers and therapeutic targets.