ORCO: Ollivier-Ricci Curvature-Omics: an unsupervised method for analyzing robustness in biological systems

Although recent advanced sequencing technologies have improved the resolution of genomic and proteomic data to better characterize molecular phenotypes, efficient computational tools to analyze and interpret the large-scale omic data are still needed. To address this, we have developed a network-based bioinformatic tool called Ollivier-Ricci curvature-omics (ORCO). ORCO incorporates gene interaction information with omic data into a biological network, and computes Ollivier-Ricci curvature (ORC) values for individual interactions. ORC, an edge-based measure, indicates network robustness and captures global gene signaling changes in functional cooperation using a consistent information passing measure, thereby helping identify therapeutic targets and regulatory modules in biological systems. This tool can be applicable to any data that can be represented as a network. ORCO is an open-source Python package and publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/aksimhal/ORC-Omics.