Project description:BackgroundComplexity and noise in expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) studies make it difficult to distinguish potential regulatory relationships among the many interactions. The predominant method of identifying eQTLs finds associations that are significant at a genome-wide level. The vast number of statistical tests carried out on these data make false negatives very likely. Corrections for multiple testing error render genome-wide eQTL techniques unable to detect modest regulatory effects. We propose an alternative method to identify eQTLs that builds on traditional approaches. In contrast to genome-wide techniques, our method determines the significance of an association between an expression trait and a locus with respect to the set of all associations to the expression trait. The use of this specific information facilitates identification of expression traits that have an expression profile that is characterized by a single exceptional association to a locus. Our approach identifies expression traits that have exceptional associations regardless of the genome-wide significance of those associations. This property facilitates the identification of possible false negatives for genome-wide significance. Further, our approach has the property of prioritizing expression traits that are affected by few strong associations. Expression traits identified by this method may warrant additional study because their expression level may be affected by targeting genes near a single locus.ResultsWe demonstrate our method by identifying eQTL hotspots in Plasmodium falciparum (malaria) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast). We demonstrate the prioritization of traits with few strong genetic effects through Gene Ontology (GO) analysis of Yeast. Our results are strongly consistent with results gathered using genome-wide methods and identify additional hotspots and eQTLs.ConclusionsNew eQTLs and hotspots found with this method may represent regions of the genome or biological processes that are controlled through few relatively strong genetic interactions. These points of interest warrant experimental investigation.

Project description:Background Many microarray experiments search for genes with differential expression between a common “reference” group and multiple test groups, like in the case of time-course designs or of various treatments versus a control condition. In such cases, currently employed statistical approaches based on t-test or close derivatives have limited efficacy, mostly because estimation of noise is done on only two groups at time. Alternative approaches based on ANOVA correctly capture noise from all the groups, but then do not confront single test groups with the reference. We therefore conceived a statistical test for pairwise comparisons between the reference group and each test group that uses within-group variance calculated from all the groups. Results We implemented an R-Bioconductor package named Mulcom, with a statistical test derived from the Dunnett’s test, designed to compare multiple experimental groups against a common reference. In addition to the basic Dunnett’s t value, the package includes an optional minimal fold-change threshold, m. Thanks to automated, permutation-based estimation of False Discovery Rate (FDR), the package also permits fast optimization of the test, to obtain the maximum number of significant genes at a given FDR value. When applied on a time-course experiment profiled in parallel on two microarray platforms, and compared with currently used tests, Mulcom displayed higher concordance of significant genes in the two array platforms, and higher enrichment in functional annotation to categories related to the biology of the experiment. Conclusions The Mulcom package provides a fast and powerful tool for the identification of differentially expressed genes when several experimental conditions are compared with a common reference. We found that Mulcom leads to lists of differentially expressed genes that are particularly consistent across microarray platforms and enriched in significant classes of genes. In our opinion, the main reasons for these good performances are three: (i) within-group variability is estimated from all experimental groups even if only two of them are compared each time; (ii) the optional fold-change threshold m avoids false positives due to aberrantly low within-group variability; (iii) automated test optimization allows maximizing sensitivity without compromising specificity.

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Finding associations in a heterogeneous setting: statistical test for aberration enrichment.

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