Zhen Zhang

Zhen Zhang


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

3Years (2024-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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20 February 2024 in BMC Bioinformatics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
HKHaiyue Kuang
Haiyue Kuang
ZZZhen Zhang
Zhen Zhang
BZBin Zeng
Bin Zeng
XLXin Liu
Xin Liu
HZHao Zuo
Hao Zuo
LWLei Wang
Lei Wang
Background: In recent years, the extensive use of drugs and antibiotics has led to increasing microbial resistance. Therefore, it becomes crucial to explore deep connections between drugs and microbes. However, traditional biological experiments are very expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it is meaningful to develop efficient computational models to forecast potential microbe-drug associations. Results: In this manuscript, we proposed a novel prediction model called GARFMDA by combining graph attention networks and bilayer random forest to infer probable microbe-drug correlations. In GARFMDA, through integrating different microbe-drug-disease correlation indices, we constructed two different microbe-drug networks first. And then, based on multiple measures of similarity, we constructed a unique feature matrix for drugs and microbes respectively. Next, we fed these newly-obtained microbe-drug networks together with feature matrices into the graph attention network to extract the low-dimensional feature representations for drugs and microbes separately. Thereafter, these low-dimensional feature representations, along with the feature matrices, would be further inputted into the first layer of the Bilayer random forest model to obtain the contribution values of all features. And then, after removing features with low contribution values, these contribution values would be fed into the second layer of the Bilayer random forest to detect potential links between microbes and drugs. Conclusions: Experimental results and case studies show that GARFMDA can achieve better prediction performance than state-of-the-art approaches, which means that GARFMDA may be a useful tool in the field of microbe-drug association prediction in the future. Besides, the source code of GARFMDA is available at https://github.com/KuangHaiYue/GARFMDA.git

8 January 2024 in Frontiers in Microbiology
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
HTHuilin Tan
Huilin Tan
ZZZhen Zhang
Zhen Zhang
XLXin Liu
Xin Liu
YCYiming Chen
Yiming Chen
ZYZinuo Yang
Zinuo Yang
LWLei Wang
Lei Wang
Introduction: Recent researches have demonstrated that microbes are crucial for the growth and development of the human body, the movement of nutrients, and human health. Diseases may arise as a result of disruptions and imbalances in the microbiome. The pathological investigation of associated diseases and the advancement of clinical medicine can both benefit from the identification of drug-associated microbes.Methods: In this article, we proposed a new prediction model called MDSVDNV to infer potential microbe-drug associations, in which the Node2vec network embedding approach and the singular value decomposition (SVD) matrix decomposition method were first adopted to produce linear and non-linear representations of microbe interactions.Results and discussion: Compared with state-of-the-art competitive methods, intensive experimental results demonstrated that MDSVDNV could achieve the best AUC value of 98.51% under a 5-fold CV, which indicated that MDSVDNV outperformed existing competing models and may be an effective method for discovering latent microbe–drug associations in the future.

23 May 2024 in Frontiers in Microbiology
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ZYZinuo Yang
Zinuo Yang
LWLei Wang
Lei Wang
XZXiangrui Zhang
Xiangrui Zhang
BZBin Zeng
Bin Zeng
ZZZhen Zhang
Zhen Zhang
XLXin Liu
Xin Liu
Introduction: Numerous studies show that microbes in the human body are very closely linked to the human host and can affect the human host by modulating the efficacy and toxicity of drugs. However, discovering potential microbe-drug associations through traditional wet labs is expensive and time-consuming, hence, it is important and necessary to develop effective computational models to detect possible microbe-drug associations.Methods: In this manuscript, we proposed a new prediction model named LCASPMDA by combining the learnable graph convolutional attention network and the self-paced iterative sampling ensemble strategy to infer latent microbe-drug associations. In LCASPMDA, we first constructed a heterogeneous network based on newly downloaded known microbe-drug associations. Then, we adopted the learnable graph convolutional attention network to learn the hidden features of nodes in the heterogeneous network. After that, we utilized the self-paced iterative sampling ensemble strategy to select the most informative negative samples to train the Multi-Layer Perceptron classifier and put the newly-extracted hidden features into the trained MLP classifier to infer possible microbe-drug associations.Results and discussion: Intensive experimental results on two different public databases including the MDAD and the aBiofilm showed that LCASPMDA could achieve better performance than state-of-the-art baseline methods in microbe-drug association prediction.

29 July 2024 in Frontiers in Microbiology
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
CZChuyi Zhang
Chuyi Zhang
ZZZhen Zhang
Zhen Zhang
FZFeng Zhang
Feng Zhang
BZBin Zeng
Bin Zeng
XLXin Liu
Xin Liu
LWLei Wang
Lei Wang
Introduction: Accumulating evidence shows that human health and disease are closely related to the microbes in the human body.Methods: In this manuscript, a new computational model based on graph attention networks and sparse autoencoders, called GCANCAE, was proposed for inferring possible microbe–disease associations. In GCANCAE, we first constructed a heterogeneous network by combining known microbe–disease relationships, disease similarity, and microbial similarity. Then, we adopted the improved GCN and the CSAE to extract neighbor relations in the adjacency matrix and novel feature representations in heterogeneous networks. After that, in order to estimate the likelihood of a potential microbe associated with a disease, we integrated these two types of representations to create unique eigenmatrices for diseases and microbes, respectively, and obtained predicted scores for potential microbe–disease associations by calculating the inner product of these two types of eigenmatrices.Results and discussion: Based on the baseline databases such as the HMDAD and the Disbiome, intensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the prediction ability of GCANCAE, and the experimental results demonstrated that GCANCAE achieved better performance than state-of-the-art competitive methods under the frameworks of both 2-fold and 5-fold CV. Furthermore, case studies of three categories of common diseases, such as asthma, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and type 2 diabetes (T2D), confirmed the efficiency of GCANCAE.