Dataset Information

RNA-Enrich: a cut-off free functional enrichment testing method for RNA-seq with improved detection power.

ABSTRACT:

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Tests for differential gene expression with RNA-seq data have a tendency to identify certain types of transcripts as significant, e.g. longer and highly-expressed transcripts. This tendency has been shown to bias gene set enrichment (GSE) testing, which is used to find over- or under-represented biological functions in the data. Yet, there remains a surprising lack of tools for GSE testing specific for RNA-seq. We present a new GSE method for RNA-seq data, RNA-Enrich, that accounts for the above tendency empirically by adjusting for average read count per gene. RNA-Enrich is a quick, flexible method and web-based tool, with 16 available gene annotation databases. It does not require a P-value cut-off to define differential expression, and works well even with small sample-sized experiments. We show that adjusting for read counts per gene improves both the type I error rate and detection power of the test.

Availability and implementation

RNA-Enrich is available at http://lrpath.ncibi.org or from supplemental material as R code.

Contact

sartorma@umich.edu

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUBMITTER: Lee C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5860544 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

RNA-Enrich: a cut-off free functional enrichment testing method for RNA-seq with improved detection power.

Lee Chee C Patil Snehal S Sartor Maureen A MA

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 20151125 7

<h4>Unlabelled</h4>Tests for differential gene expression with RNA-seq data have a tendency to identify certain types of transcripts as significant, e.g. longer and highly-expressed transcripts. This tendency has been shown to bias gene set enrichment (GSE) testing, which is used to find over- or under-represented biological functions in the data. Yet, there remains a surprising lack of tools for GSE testing specific for RNA-seq. We present a new GSE method for RNA-seq data, RNA-Enrich, that acc ...[more]

PMID: 26607492

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Project description:BackgroundIdentifying differentially expressed genes between the same or different species is an urgent demand for biological and medical research. For RNA-seq data, systematic technical effects and different sequencing depths are usually encountered when conducting experiments. Normalization is regarded as an essential step in the discovery of biologically important changes in expression. The present methods usually involve normalization of the data with a scaling factor, followed by detection of significant genes. However, more than one scaling factor may exist because of the complexity of real data. Consequently, methods that normalize data by a single scaling factor may deliver suboptimal performance or may not even work.The development of modern machine learning techniques has provided a new perspective regarding discrimination between differentially expressed (DE) and non-DE genes. However, in reality, the non-DE genes comprise only a small set and may contain housekeeping genes (in same species) or conserved orthologous genes (in different species). Therefore, the process of detecting DE genes can be formulated as a one-class classification problem, where only non-DE genes are observed, while DE genes are completely absent from the training data.ResultsIn this study, we transform the problem to an outlier detection problem by treating DE genes as outliers, and we propose a scaling-free minimum enclosing ball (SFMEB) method to construct a smallest possible ball to contain the known non-DE genes in a feature space. The genes outside the minimum enclosing ball can then be naturally considered to be DE genes. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed SFMEB method does not require data normalization, which is particularly attractive when the RNA-seq data include more than one scaling factor. Furthermore, the SFMEB method could be easily extended to different species without normalization.ConclusionsSimulation studies demonstrate that the SFMEB method works well in a wide range of settings, especially when the data are heterogeneous or biological replicates. Analysis of the real data also supports the conclusion that the SFMEB method outperforms other existing competitors. The R package of the proposed method is available at https://bioconductor.org/packages/MEB .

Dataset Information

RNA-Enrich: a cut-off free functional enrichment testing method for RNA-seq with improved detection power.

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Availability and implementation

Contact

Supplementary information

Publications

RNA-Enrich: a cut-off free functional enrichment testing method for RNA-seq with improved detection power.

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