Abstract

Orphan nuclear receptors (oNRs) provide huge opportunities for the discovery of new drug targets. Identifying novel and perhaps unexpected types of ligands for oNRs may gain insight into potentially new principles of physiology. Recently, the network-based approaches are playing an increasingly important role in identifying and validating novel ligands for nuclear receptors. This review describes current progresses in network-based approaches for ligand prediction and discusses their strengths and some of the underlying difficulties.

Keywords: Ligand identification, ligand prediction, network-based, nuclear receptor, oNR, orphan receptor, network-derived clusters, Gene Ontology, efficiency, Database for drug target identification