PATHOME: an algorithm for accurately detecting differentially expressed subpathways.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Nam S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4182295 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:BACKGROUND: Gene expression is governed by complex networks, and differences in expression patterns between distinct biological conditions may therefore be complex and multivariate in nature. Yet, current statistical methods for detecting differential expression merely consider the univariate difference in expression level of each gene in isolation, thus potentially neglecting many genes of biological importance. RESULTS: We have developed a novel algorithm for detecting multivariate expression patterns, named Recursive Independence Test (RIT). This algorithm generalizes differential expression testing to more complex expression patterns, while still including genes found by the univariate approach. We prove that RIT is consistent and controls error rates for small sample sizes. Simulation studies confirm that RIT offers more power than univariate differential expression analysis when multivariate effects are present. We apply RIT to gene expression data sets from diabetes and cancer studies, revealing several putative disease genes that were not detected by univariate differential expression analysis. CONCLUSION: The proposed RIT algorithm increases the power of gene expression analysis by considering multivariate effects while retaining error rate control, and may be useful when conventional differential expression tests yield few findings.
| S-EPMC1885271 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Presence of considerable noise and missing data points make analysis of mass-spectrometry (MS) based proteomic data a challenging task. The missing values in MS data are caused by the inability of MS machines to reliably detect proteins whose abundances fall below the detection limit. We developed a Bayesian algorithm that exploits this knowledge and uses missing data points as a complementary source of information to the observed protein intensities in order to find differentially expressed proteins by analysing MS based proteomic data. We compared its accuracy with many other methods using several simulated datasets. It consistently outperformed other methods. We then used it to analyse proteomic screens of a breast cancer (BC) patient cohort. It revealed large differences between the proteomic landscapes of triple negative and Luminal A, which are the most and least aggressive types of BC. Unexpectedly, majority of these differences could be attributed to the direct transcriptional activity of only seven transcription factors some of which are known to be inactive in triple negative BC. We also identified two new proteins which significantly correlated with the survival of BC patients, and therefore may have potential diagnostic/prognostic values.
| S-EPMC4957118 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundMicroarray experiments are often performed with a small number of biological replicates, resulting in low statistical power for detecting differentially expressed genes and concomitant high false positive rates. While increasing sample size can increase statistical power and decrease error rates, with too many samples, valuable resources are not used efficiently. The issue of how many replicates are required in a typical experimental system needs to be addressed. Of particular interest is the difference in required sample sizes for similar experiments in inbred vs. outbred populations (e.g. mouse and rat vs. human).ResultsWe hypothesize that if all other factors (assay protocol, microarray platform, data pre-processing) were equal, fewer individuals would be needed for the same statistical power using inbred animals as opposed to unrelated human subjects, as genetic effects on gene expression will be removed in the inbred populations. We apply the same normalization algorithm and estimate the variance of gene expression for a variety of cDNA data sets (humans, inbred mice and rats) comparing two conditions. Using one sample, paired sample or two independent sample t-tests, we calculate the sample sizes required to detect a 1.5-, 2-, and 4-fold changes in expression level as a function of false positive rate, power and percentage of genes that have a standard deviation below a given percentile.ConclusionsFactors that affect power and sample size calculations include variability of the population, the desired detectable differences, the power to detect the differences, and an acceptable error rate. In addition, experimental design, technical variability and data pre-processing play a role in the power of the statistical tests in microarrays. We show that the number of samples required for detecting a 2-fold change with 90% probability and a p-value of 0.01 in humans is much larger than the number of samples commonly used in present day studies, and that far fewer individuals are needed for the same statistical power when using inbred animals rather than unrelated human subjects.
| S-EPMC533874 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To mine gene expression data sets effectively, analysis frameworks need to incorporate methods that identify intergenic relationships within enriched biologically relevant subpathways. For this purpose, we developed the Topology Enrichment Analysis frameworK (TEAK). TEAK employs a novel in-house algorithm and a tailor-made Clique Percolation Method to extract linear and nonlinear KEGG subpathways, respectively. TEAK scores subpathways using the Bayesian Information Criterion for context specific data and the Kullback-Leibler divergence for case-control data. In this article, we utilized TEAK with experimental studies to analyze microarray data sets profiling stress responses in the model eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Using a public microarray data set, we identified via TEAK linear sphingolipid metabolic subpathways activated during the yeast response to nitrogen stress, and phenotypic analyses of the corresponding deletion strains indicated previously unreported fitness defects for the dpl1Δ and lag1Δ mutants under conditions of nitrogen limitation. In addition, we studied the yeast filamentous response to nitrogen stress by profiling changes in transcript levels upon deletion of two key filamentous growth transcription factors, FLO8 and MSS11. Via TEAK we identified a nonlinear glycerophospholipid metabolism subpathway involving the SLC1 gene, which we found via mutational analysis to be required for yeast filamentous growth.
| S-EPMC3561980 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is an interstitial lung disease of unknown cause that lacks a proven therapy for altering its high mortality rate. Microarrays have been employed to investigate the pathogenesis of IPF, but are presented mostly at the gene-expression level due to technologic limitations. In as much as, alternative RNA splicing isoforms are increasingly identified as potential regulators of human diseases, including IPF, we propose a new approach with the capacity to detect splicing variants using RNA-seq data. We conducted a joint analysis of differential expression and differential splicing on annotated human genes and isoforms, and identified 122 non-differentially expressed genes with a high degree of "switch" between major and minor isoforms. Three cases with variant mechanisms for alternative splicing were validated using qRT-PCR, among the group of genes in which expression was not significantly changed at the gene level. We also identified 35 novel transcripts that were unique to the fibrotic lungs using exon-exon junction evidence, and selected a representative for qRT-PCR validation. The results of our study are likely to provide new insight into the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis and may eventuate in new treatment targets.
| S-EPMC3699530 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Different methods have been proposed for analyzing differentially expressed (DE) genes in microarray data. Methods based on statistical tests that incorporate expression level variability are used more commonly than those based on fold change (FC). However, FC based results are more reproducible and biologically relevant. RESULTS:We propose a new method based on fold change rank ordering statistics (FCROS). We exploit the variation in calculated FC levels using combinatorial pairs of biological conditions in the datasets. A statistic is associated with the ranks of the FC values for each gene, and the resulting probability is used to identify the DE genes within an error level. The FCROS method is deterministic, requires a low computational runtime and also solves the problem of multiple tests which usually arises with microarray datasets. CONCLUSION:We compared the performance of FCROS with those of other methods using synthetic and real microarray datasets. We found that FCROS is well suited for DE gene identification from noisy datasets when compared with existing FC based methods.
| S-EPMC3899927 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Over the past two decades, researchers have discovered a special form of alternative splicing that produces a circular form of RNA. Although these circular RNAs (circRNAs) have garnered considerable attention in the scientific community for their biogenesis and functions, the focus of current studies has been on the tissue-specific circRNAs that exist only in one tissue but not in other tissues or on the disease-specific circRNAs that exist in certain disease conditions, such as cancer, but not under normal conditions. This approach was conducted in the relative absence of methods that analyze a group of common circRNAs that exist in both conditions, but are more abundant in one condition relative to another (differentially expressed). Studies of differentially expressed circRNAs (DECs) between two conditions would serve as a significant first step in filling this void. Here, we introduce a novel computational tool, seekCRIT (seek for differentially expressed CircRNAs In Transcriptome), that identifies the DECs between two conditions from high-throughput sequencing data. Using rat retina RNA-seq data from ischemic and normal conditions, we show that over 74% of identifiable circRNAs are expressed in both conditions and over 40 circRNAs are differentially expressed between two conditions. We also obtain a high qPCR validation rate of 90% for DECs with a FDR of < 5%. Our results demonstrate that seekCRIT is a novel and efficient approach to detect DECs using rRNA depleted RNA-seq data. seekCRIT is freely downloadable at https://github.com/UofLBioinformatics/seekCRIT. The source code is licensed under the MIT License. seekCRIT is developed and tested on Linux CentOS-7.
| S-EPMC7598922 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundIdentification of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) under different experimental conditions is an important task in many microarray studies. However, choosing which method to use for a particular application is problematic because its performance depends on the evaluation metric, the dataset, and so on. In addition, when using the Affymetrix GeneChip(R) system, researchers must select a preprocessing algorithm from a number of competing algorithms such as MAS, RMA, and DFW, for obtaining expression-level measurements. To achieve optimal performance for detecting DEGs, a suitable combination of gene selection method and preprocessing algorithm needs to be selected for a given probe-level dataset.ResultsWe introduce a new fold-change (FC)-based method, the weighted average difference method (WAD), for ranking DEGs. It uses the average difference and relative average signal intensity so that highly expressed genes are highly ranked on the average for the different conditions. The idea is based on our observation that known or potential marker genes (or proteins) tend to have high expression levels. We compared WAD with seven other methods; average difference (AD), FC, rank products (RP), moderated t statistic (modT), significance analysis of microarrays (samT), shrinkage t statistic (shrinkT), and intensity-based moderated t statistic (ibmT). The evaluation was performed using a total of 38 different binary (two-class) probe-level datasets: two artificial "spike-in" datasets and 36 real experimental datasets. The results indicate that WAD outperforms the other methods when sensitivity and specificity are considered simultaneously: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for WAD was the highest on average for the 38 datasets. The gene ranking for WAD was also the most consistent when subsets of top-ranked genes produced from three different preprocessed data (MAS, RMA, and DFW) were compared. Overall, WAD performed the best for MAS-preprocessed data and the FC-based methods (AD, WAD, FC, or RP) performed well for RMA and DFW-preprocessed data.ConclusionWAD is a promising alternative to existing methods for ranking DEGs with two classes. Its high performance should increase researchers' confidence in microarray analyses.
| S-EPMC2464587 | biostudies-literature
Project description:MotivationDeregulated signaling cascades are known to play a crucial role in many pathogenic processes, among them are tumor initiation and progression. In the recent past, modern experimental techniques that allow for measuring the amount of mRNA transcripts of almost all known human genes in a tissue or even in a single cell have opened new avenues for studying the activity of the signaling cascades and for understanding the information flow in the networks.ResultsWe present a novel dynamic programming algorithm for detecting deregulated signaling cascades. The so-called FiDePa (Finding Deregulated Paths) algorithm interprets differences in the expression profiles of tumor and normal tissues. It relies on the well-known gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and efficiently detects all paths in a given regulatory or signaling network that are significantly enriched with differentially expressed genes or proteins. Since our algorithm allows for comparing a single tumor expression profile with the control group, it facilitates the detection of specific regulatory features of a tumor that may help to optimize tumor therapy. To demonstrate the capabilities of our algorithm, we analyzed a glioma expression dataset with respect to a directed graph that combined the regulatory networks of the KEGG and TRANSPATH database. The resulting glioma consensus network that encompasses all detected deregulated paths contained many genes and pathways that are known to be key players in glioma or cancer-related pathogenic processes. Moreover, we were able to correlate clinically relevant features like necrosis or metastasis with the detected paths.AvailabilityC++ source code is freely available, BiNA can be downloaded from http://www.bnplusplus.org/.Contactack@bioinf.uni-sb.deSupplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
| S-EPMC2781748 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Using next-generation sequencing technology to measure gene expression, an empirically intriguing question concerns the identification of differentially expressed genes across treatment groups. Existing methods aim to identify genes whose mean expressions differ among treatment groups by assuming equal dispersion across all groups. For syndromes, however, various combinations of gene expression alterations can result in the same disease, leading to greater heteroscedasticity in the biological replicates in the disease group compared to the normal group. Traditional methods that only consider changes in the mean will fail to fully analyze gene expression in such a scenario. In addition, sequencing technology is relatively expensive; most labs can only afford a few replicates per treatment group, which poses further challenges to reliably estimating the mean and dispersion under each treatment condition. RESULTS:We designed an empirical Bayes method and a pooled permutation test to simultaneously consider the change in mean and dispersion across treatment groups. We further computed confidence intervals based on Bayes estimates to identify differentially expressed genes that are unique to each disease sample as well as those that are common across all disease samples. We illustrated our method by applying it to gene expression data from a large offspring syndrome experiment, which motivated this study. We compared our method to competing approaches through simulation studies that mimicked the real datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. CONCLUSIONS:We will show that, compared to popular methods that only aim to find the difference in the mean, our method can capture greater variation in the disease group to effectively identify differentially expressed genes for syndromes.
| S-EPMC6148965 | biostudies-literature