Dataset Information

A Markov random field-based approach for joint estimation of differentially expressed genes in mouse transcriptome data.

ABSTRACT: The statistical methodology developed in this study was motivated by our interest in studying neurodevelopment using the mouse brain RNA-Seq data set, where gene expression levels were measured in multiple layers in the somatosensory cortex across time in both female and male samples. We aim to identify differentially expressed genes between adjacent time points, which may provide insights on the dynamics of brain development. Because of the extremely small sample size (one male and female at each time point), simple marginal analysis may be underpowered. We propose a Markov random field (MRF)-based approach to capitalizing on the between layers similarity, temporal dependency and the similarity between sex. The model parameters are estimated by an efficient EM algorithm with mean field-like approximation. Simulation results and real data analysis suggest that the proposed model improves the power to detect differentially expressed genes than simple marginal analysis. Our method also reveals biologically interesting results in the mouse brain RNA-Seq data set.

SUBMITTER: Lin Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5587217 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

A Markov random field-based approach for joint estimation of differentially expressed genes in mouse transcriptome data.

Lin Zhixiang Z Li Mingfeng M Sestan Nenad N Zhao Hongyu H

Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 20160401 2

The statistical methodology developed in this study was motivated by our interest in studying neurodevelopment using the mouse brain RNA-Seq data set, where gene expression levels were measured in multiple layers in the somatosensory cortex across time in both female and male samples. We aim to identify differentially expressed genes between adjacent time points, which may provide insights on the dynamics of brain development. Because of the extremely small sample size (one male and female at ea ...[more]

PMID: 26926866

Similar Datasets

Project description:BACKGROUND:Recent advances in sequencing technologies have enabled parallel assays of chromatin accessibility and gene expression for major human cell lines. Such innovation provides a great opportunity to decode phenotypic consequences of genetic variation via the construction of predictive gene regulatory network models. However, there still lacks a computational method to systematically integrate chromatin accessibility information with gene expression data to recover complicated regulatory relationships between genes in a tissue-specific manner. RESULTS:We propose a Markov random field (MRF) model for constructing tissue-specific transcriptional regulatory networks via integrative analysis of DNase-seq and RNA-seq data. Our method, named CSNets (cell-line specific regulatory networks), first infers regulatory networks for individual cell lines using chromatin accessibility information, and then fine-tunes these networks using the MRF based on pairwise similarity between cell lines derived from gene expression data. Using this method, we constructed regulatory networks specific to 110 human cell lines and 13 major tissues with the use of ENCODE data. We demonstrated the high quality of these networks via comprehensive statistical analysis based on ChIP-seq profiles, functional annotations, taxonomic analysis, and literature surveys. We further applied these networks to analyze GWAS data of Crohn's disease and prostate cancer. Results were either consistent with the literature or provided biological insights into regulatory mechanisms of these two complex diseases. The website of CSNets is freely available at http://bioinfo.au.tsinghua.edu.cn/jianglab/CSNETS/ . CONCLUSIONS:CSNets demonstrated the power of joint analysis on epigenomic and transcriptomic data towards the accurate construction of gene regulatory network. Our work provides not only a useful resource of regulatory networks to the community, but also valuable experiences in methodology development for multi-omics data integration.

Project description:Spatial transcriptomics has been emerging as a powerful technique for resolving gene expression profiles while retaining tissue spatial information. These spatially resolved transcriptomics make it feasible to examine the complex multicellular systems of different microenvironments. To answer scientific questions with spatial transcriptomics and expand our understanding of how cell types and states are regulated by microenvironment, the first step is to identify cell clusters by integrating the available spatial information. Here, we introduce SC-MEB, an empirical Bayes approach for spatial clustering analysis using a hidden Markov random field. We have also derived an efficient expectation-maximization algorithm based on an iterative conditional mode for SC-MEB. In contrast to BayesSpace, a recently developed method, SC-MEB is not only computationally efficient and scalable to large sample sizes but is also capable of choosing the smoothness parameter and the number of clusters. We performed comprehensive simulation studies to demonstrate the superiority of SC-MEB over some existing methods. We applied SC-MEB to analyze the spatial transcriptome of human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex tissues and mouse hypothalamic preoptic region. Our analysis results showed that SC-MEB can achieve a similar or better clustering performance to BayesSpace, which uses the true number of clusters and a fixed smoothness parameter. Moreover, SC-MEB is scalable to large 'sample sizes'. We then employed SC-MEB to analyze a colon dataset from a patient with colorectal cancer (CRC) and COVID-19, and further performed differential expression analysis to identify signature genes related to the clustering results. The heatmap of identified signature genes showed that the clusters identified using SC-MEB were more separable than those obtained with BayesSpace. Using pathway analysis, we identified three immune-related clusters, and in a further comparison, found the mean expression of COVID-19 signature genes was greater in immune than non-immune regions of colon tissue. SC-MEB provides a valuable computational tool for investigating the structural organizations of tissues from spatial transcriptomic data.

Dataset Information

A Markov random field-based approach for joint estimation of differentially expressed genes in mouse transcriptome data.

Publications

A Markov random field-based approach for joint estimation of differentially expressed genes in mouse transcriptome data.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets