Dataset Information

Functional Gene Networks: R/Bioc package to generate and analyse gene networks derived from functional enrichment and clustering.

ABSTRACT: Functional Gene Networks (FGNet) is an R/Bioconductor package that generates gene networks derived from the results of functional enrichment analysis (FEA) and annotation clustering. The sets of genes enriched with specific biological terms (obtained from a FEA platform) are transformed into a network by establishing links between genes based on common functional annotations and common clusters. The network provides a new view of FEA results revealing gene modules with similar functions and genes that are related to multiple functions. In addition to building the functional network, FGNet analyses the similarity between the groups of genes and provides a distance heatmap and a bipartite network of functionally overlapping genes. The application includes an interface to directly perform FEA queries using different external tools: DAVID, GeneTerm Linker, TopGO or GAGE; and a graphical interface to facilitate the use.

SUBMITTER: Aibar S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4426835 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Functional Gene Networks: R/Bioc package to generate and analyse gene networks derived from functional enrichment and clustering.

Aibar Sara S Fontanillo Celia C Droste Conrad C De Las Rivas Javier J

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 20150118 10

Functional Gene Networks (FGNet) is an R/Bioconductor package that generates gene networks derived from the results of functional enrichment analysis (FEA) and annotation clustering. The sets of genes enriched with specific biological terms (obtained from a FEA platform) are transformed into a network by establishing links between genes based on common functional annotations and common clusters. The network provides a new view of FEA results revealing gene modules with similar functions and gene ...[more]

PMID: 25600944

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Project description:Integration of biological knowledge encoded in various lists of functionally related genes has become one of the most important aspects of analyzing genome-wide functional genomics data. In the context of cluster analysis, functional coherence of clusters established through such analyses have been used to identify biologically meaningful clusters, compare clustering algorithms and identify biological pathways associated with the biological process under investigation.We developed a computational framework for analytically and visually integrating knowledge-based functional categories with the cluster analysis of genomics data. The framework is based on the simple, conceptually appealing, and biologically interpretable gene-specific functional coherence score (CLEAN score). The score is derived by correlating the clustering structure as a whole with functional categories of interest. We directly demonstrate that integrating biological knowledge in this way improves the reproducibility of conclusions derived from cluster analysis. The CLEAN score differentiates between the levels of functional coherence for genes within the same cluster based on their membership in enriched functional categories. We show that this aspect results in higher reproducibility across independent datasets and produces more informative genes for distinguishing different sample types than the scores based on the traditional cluster-wide analysis. We also demonstrate the utility of the CLEAN framework in comparing clusterings produced by different algorithms. CLEAN was implemented as an add-on R package and can be downloaded at http://Clusteranalysis.org. The package integrates routines for calculating gene specific functional coherence scores and the open source interactive Java-based viewer Functional TreeView (FTreeView).Our results indicate that using the gene-specific functional coherence score improves the reproducibility of the conclusions made about clusters of co-expressed genes over using the traditional cluster-wide scores. Using gene-specific coherence scores also simplifies the comparisons of clusterings produced by different clustering algorithms and provides a simple tool for selecting genes with a "functionally coherent" expression profile.

Project description:BackgroundThe statistical evaluation of pathway enrichment, i.e. of gene profiles' confluence to the pathway level, allows exploring molecular landscapes using functionally annotated gene sets. However, pathway scores can also be used as predictive features in machine learning. That requires, firstly, increasing statistical power and biological relevance via a network enrichment analysis (NEA) and, secondly, a fast and convenient procedure for rendering the original data into a space of pathway scores. However, previous implementations of NEA involved multiple runs of network randomization and were therefore slow.ResultsHere, we present a new R package NEArender which can transform raw 'omics' features of experimental or clinical samples into matrices describing the same samples with many fewer NEA-based pathway scores. This is done via a parametric estimation of the null binomial distribution and is thus much faster and less biased than randomization procedures. Further, we compare estimates from these two alternative procedures and demonstrate that the summarization of individual genes to pathways increases the statistical power compared to both the default differential expression analysis on individual genes and the state-of-the-art gene set enrichment analysis. The package also contains functions for preparing input, modeling null distributions, and evaluating alternative versions of the global network.ConclusionsBeyond the state-of-the-art exploration of molecular data through pathway enrichment, score matrices produced by NEArender can be used in larger bioinformatics pipelines as input for phenotype modeling, predicting disease outcomes etc. This approach is often more sensitive and robust than using the original data. The package NEArender is complementary to the online NEA tool EviNet ( https://www.evinet.org ) and, unlike of the latter, enables high performance of computations off-line. The R package NEArender version 1.4 is available at CRAN repository https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/NEArender/.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Despite the large increase of transcriptomic studies that look for gene signatures on diseases, there is still a need for integrative approaches that obtain separation of multiple pathological states providing robust selection of gene markers for each disease subtype and information about the possible links or relations between those genes. RESULTS:We present a network-oriented and data-driven bioinformatic approach that searches for association of genes and diseases based on the analysis of genome-wide expression data derived from microarrays or RNA-Seq studies. The approach aims to (i) identify gene sets associated to different pathological states analysed together; (ii) identify a minimum subset within these genes that unequivocally differentiates and classifies the compared disease subtypes; (iii) provide a measurement of the discriminant power of these genes and (iv) identify links between the genes that characterise each of the disease subtypes. This bioinformatic approach is implemented in an R package, named geNetClassifier, available as an open access tool in Bioconductor. To illustrate the performance of the tool, we applied it to two independent datasets: 250 samples from patients with four major leukemia subtypes analysed using expression arrays; another leukemia dataset analysed with RNA-Seq that includes a subtype also present in the previous set. The results show the selection of key deregulated genes recently reported in the literature and assigned to the leukemia subtypes studied. We also show, using these independent datasets, the selection of similar genes in a network built for the same disease subtype. CONCLUSIONS:The construction of gene networks related to specific disease subtypes that include parameters such as gene-to-gene association, gene disease specificity and gene discriminant power can be very useful to draw gene-disease maps and to unravel the molecular features that characterize specific pathological states. The application of the bioinformatic tool here presented shows a neat way to achieve such molecular characterization of the diseases using genome-wide expression data.

Dataset Information

Functional Gene Networks: R/Bioc package to generate and analyse gene networks derived from functional enrichment and clustering.

Publications

Functional Gene Networks: R/Bioc package to generate and analyse gene networks derived from functional enrichment and clustering.

Similar Datasets

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