Dataset Information

On the assessment of statistical significance of three-dimensional colocalization of sets of genomic elements.

ABSTRACT: A growing body of experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that the 3D structure of chromatin in the nucleus is closely linked to important functional processes, including DNA replication and gene regulation. In support of this hypothesis, several research groups have examined sets of functionally associated genomic loci, with the aim of determining whether those loci are statistically significantly colocalized. This work presents a critical assessment of two previously reported analyses, both of which used genome-wide DNA-DNA interaction data from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and both of which rely upon a simple notion of the statistical significance of colocalization. We show that these previous analyses rely upon a faulty assumption, and we propose a correct non-parametric resampling approach to the same problem. Applying this approach to the same data set does not support the hypothesis that transcriptionally coregulated genes tend to colocalize, but strongly supports the colocalization of centromeres, and provides some evidence of colocalization of origins of early DNA replication, chromosomal breakpoints and transfer RNAs.

SUBMITTER: Witten DM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3351188 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

On the assessment of statistical significance of three-dimensional colocalization of sets of genomic elements.

Witten Daniela M DM Noble William Stafford WS

Nucleic acids research 20120120 9

A growing body of experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that the 3D structure of chromatin in the nucleus is closely linked to important functional processes, including DNA replication and gene regulation. In support of this hypothesis, several research groups have examined sets of functionally associated genomic loci, with the aim of determining whether those loci are statistically significantly colocalized. This work presents a critical assessment of two previously reported analyses, b ...[more]

PMID: 22266657

Similar Datasets

Project description:MotivationThere are a number of well-established methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) for automatically capturing systematic variation due to latent variables in large-scale genomic data. PCA and related methods may directly provide a quantitative characterization of a complex biological variable that is otherwise difficult to precisely define or model. An unsolved problem in this context is how to systematically identify the genomic variables that are drivers of systematic variation captured by PCA. Principal components (PCs) (and other estimates of systematic variation) are directly constructed from the genomic variables themselves, making measures of statistical significance artificially inflated when using conventional methods due to over-fitting.ResultsWe introduce a new approach called the jackstraw that allows one to accurately identify genomic variables that are statistically significantly associated with any subset or linear combination of PCs. The proposed method can greatly simplify complex significance testing problems encountered in genomics and can be used to identify the genomic variables significantly associated with latent variables. Using simulation, we demonstrate that our method attains accurate measures of statistical significance over a range of relevant scenarios. We consider yeast cell-cycle gene expression data, and show that the proposed method can be used to straightforwardly identify genes that are cell-cycle regulated with an accurate measure of statistical significance. We also analyze gene expression data from post-trauma patients, allowing the gene expression data to provide a molecularly driven phenotype. Using our method, we find a greater enrichment for inflammatory-related gene sets compared to the original analysis that uses a clinically defined, although likely imprecise, phenotype. The proposed method provides a useful bridge between large-scale quantifications of systematic variation and gene-level significance analyses.Availability and implementationAn R software package, called jackstraw, is available in CRAN.Contactjstorey@princeton.edu.

Dataset Information

On the assessment of statistical significance of three-dimensional colocalization of sets of genomic elements.

Publications

On the assessment of statistical significance of three-dimensional colocalization of sets of genomic elements.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets