Hyperpathway: visualizing organization of pathway-molecule enriched interactions in omics studies via hyperbolic bipartite network embedding
Pathway enrichment analysis (PEA) of omics data identifies significant pathway-molecule associations, yet delivers results as tabular lists in which complex systems-biology insights remain inaccessible. Hyperpathway is an open-access network-based webtool that addresses this limitation through three original innovations: (1) conversion of a PEA results table into a pathway-molecule bipartite network; (2) a minimal artificial linking strategy to resolve structural disconnections; (3) a leaf removal and post-hoc reinsertion pipeline that accelerates coalescent embedding without any loss of geometric fidelity. The resulting network is visualized in a two-dimensional hyperbolic disk with flexible coloring schemes encoding hierarchical relevance, connectivity similarity, statistical significance, or user-defined annotations; revealing latent functional modules that are invisible in conventional tabular outputs. Validated on genomic, metabolomic, and lipidomic datasets, Hyperpathway enables a deeper, systems-level understanding of the interplay between pathways and their molecular components, providing insights that go beyond p-value-based significance testing. Beyond PEA, Hyperpathway can be used as a general-purpose open webtool for fast hyperbolic embedding and interactive visualization of any bipartite network.
Authors
- Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0100-8410)
- Aldo Acevedo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8284-4474)
- Ilyes Abdelhamid (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1520-7947)
- Ziheng Liao
- Yuchi Liu
- Armel Lefebvre
Institutions
- Leiden University (NL)
- Center for Systems Biology Dresden (DE)
- The Hague University of Applied Sciences (NL)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Systems Biology and Applications
- Published
- 2026-06-09
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-026-00752-w
- Primary Topic
- Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Tsinghua University