QNetDiff: a quantitative measurement of network rewiring

Bacteria in the human body, particularly in the large intestine, are known to be associated with various diseases. To identify disease-associated bacteria (markers), a typical method is to statistically compare the relative abundance of bacteria between healthy subjects and diseased patients. However, since bacteria do not necessarily cause diseases in isolation, it is also important to focus on the interactions and relationships among bacteria when examining their association with diseases. In fact, although there are common approaches to represent and analyze bacterial interaction relationships as networks, there are limited methods to find bacteria associated with diseases through network-driven analysis. In this paper, we focus on rewiring of the bacterial network and propose a new method for quantifying the rewiring. We then apply the proposed method to a group of colorectal cancer patients. We show that it can identify and detect bacteria that cannot be detected by conventional methods such as abundance comparison. Furthermore, the proposed method is implemented as a general-purpose tool and made available to the general public.