Kinex infers causal kinases from phosphoproteomics data

Abstract

MotivationPhosphoproteomics data are essential for characterising signalling pathways, identifying drug targets, and evaluating efficacy and safety profiles of drug candidates. Emerging resources, including a substrate-specificity atlas and drug-induced phosphoproteomics profiles, may transform the inference of causal kinases. However, there is currently no open-source software that leverages insights derived from these resources. ResultsWe introduce Kinex, a workflow implemented in the same-name Python package, which infers causal serine/threonine kinases from phosphoproteomics data. Kinex allows users to score kinase-substrate interactions, perform enrichment analysis, visualise candidates of causal regulators, and query similar profiles in a database of drug-induced kinase activities. Analysing seven published studies and one newly generated dataset, we demonstrate that analysis with Kinex recovers causal effects of perturbations and reveals novel biological insights. We foresee that Kinex will become an indispensable tool for basic and translational research including drug discovery. AvailabilityKinex is released with the GNU General Public License and available at https://github.com/bedapub/kinex.