Breaking free from the chains of pathway annotation: de novo pathway discovery for the analysis of disease processes.

Interpreting the biological implications of high-throughput experiments such as gene-expression studies, genome-wide association studies and large-scale sequencing studies is not trivial. Gene-set and pathway analyses are useful tools to support the interpretation of such experiments, but rely on curated pathways or gene sets. The recent development of de novo pathway discovery methods aims to overcome this limitation.