scholarly journals SINCERITIES: Inferring gene regulatory networks from time-stamped single cell transcriptional expression profiles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Papili Gao ◽  
S.M. Minhaz Ud-Dean ◽  
Rudiyanto Gunawan

AbstractRecent advances in single cell transcriptional profiling open up a new avenue in studying the functional role of cell-to-cell variability in physiological processes such as stem cell differentiation. In this work, we developed a novel algorithm called SINCERITIES (SINgle CEll Regularized Inference using TIme-stamped Expression profileS), for the inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from single cell transcriptional expression data. In particular, we focused on time-stamped cross-sectional expression data, a common type of dataset generated from transcriptional profiling of single cells collected at multiple time points after cell stimulation. SINCERITIES recovers the regulatory (causal) relationships among genes by employing regularized linear regression, particularly ridge regression, using temporal changes in the distributions of gene expressions. Meanwhile, the modes of the gene regulations (activation and repression) come from partial correlation analyses between pairs of genes. We demonstrated the efficacy of SINCERITIES in inferring GRNs using simulated time-stamped in silico single cell expression data and single transcriptional profiling of THP-1 monocytic human leukemia cell differentiation. The case studies showed that SINCERITIES could provide accurate GRN predictions, significantly better than other GRN inference algorithms such as TSNI, GENIE3 and JUMP3. Meanwhile, SINCERITIES has a low computational complexity and is amenable to problems of extremely large dimensionality.

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Papili Gao ◽  
S M Minhaz Ud-Dean ◽  
Olivier Gandrillon ◽  
Rudiyanto Gunawan

eLife ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumin Jang ◽  
Sandeep Choubey ◽  
Leon Furchtgott ◽  
Ling-Nan Zou ◽  
Adele Doyle ◽  
...  

The complexity of gene regulatory networks that lead multipotent cells to acquire different cell fates makes a quantitative understanding of differentiation challenging. Using a statistical framework to analyze single-cell transcriptomics data, we infer the gene expression dynamics of early mouse embryonic stem (mES) cell differentiation, uncovering discrete transitions across nine cell states. We validate the predicted transitions across discrete states using flow cytometry. Moreover, using live-cell microscopy, we show that individual cells undergo abrupt transitions from a naïve to primed pluripotent state. Using the inferred discrete cell states to build a probabilistic model for the underlying gene regulatory network, we further predict and experimentally verify that these states have unique response to perturbations, thus defining them functionally. Our study provides a framework to infer the dynamics of differentiation from single cell transcriptomics data and to build predictive models of the gene regulatory networks that drive the sequence of cell fate decisions during development.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakimeh Khojasteh ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Olyaee ◽  
Alireza Khanteymoori

The development of computational methods to predict gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data is a challenging task. Many machine learning methods have been developed, including supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised to infer gene regulatory networks. Most of these methods ignore the class imbalance problem which can lead to decreasing the accuracy of predicting regulatory interactions in the network. Therefore, developing an effective method considering imbalanced data is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose EnGRNT approach to infer GRNs with high accuracy that uses ensemble-based methods. The proposed approach, as well as the gene expression data, considers the topological features of GRN. We applied our approach to the simulated Escherichia coli dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the appropriateness of the inference method relies on the size and type of expression profiles in microarray data. Except for multifactorial experimental conditions, the proposed approach outperforms unsupervised methods. The obtained results recommend the application of EnGRNT on the imbalanced datasets.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullah Karaaslanli ◽  
SATABDI SAHA ◽  
Selin Aviyente ◽  
Tapabrata Maiti

Characterizing the underlying topology of gene regulatory networks is one of the fundamental problems of systems biology. Ongoing developments in high throughput sequencing technologies has made it possible to capture the expression of thousands of genes at the single cell resolution. However, inherent cellular heterogeneity and high sparsity of the single cell datasets render void the application of regular Gaussian assumptions for constructing gene regulatory networks. Additionally, most algorithms aimed at single cell gene regulatory network reconstruction, estimate a single network ignoring group-level (cell-type) information present within the datasets. To better characterize single cell gene regulatory networks under different but related conditions we propose the joint estimation of multiple networks using multiview graph learning (mvGL). The proposed method is developed based on recent works in graph signal processing (GSP) for graph learning, where graph signals are assumed to be smooth over the unknown graph structure. Graphs corresponding to the different datasets are regularized to be similar to each other through a learned consensus graph. We further kernelize mvGL with the kernel selected to suit the structure of single cell data. An efficient algorithm based on prox-linear block coordinate descent is used to optimize mvGL. We study the performance of mvGL using synthetic data generated with a diverse set of parameters. We further show that mvGL successfully identifies well-established regulators in a mouse embryonic stem cell differentiation study and a cancer clinical study of medulloblastoma.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junil Kim ◽  
Simon Toftholm Jakobsen ◽  
Kedar Nath Natarajan ◽  
Kyoung Jae Won

ABSTRACTGene expression data has been widely used to infer gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Recent single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) data, containing the expression information of the individual cells (or status), are highly useful in blindly reconstructing regulatory mechanisms. However, it is still not easy to understand transcriptional cascade from large amount of expression data. Besides, the reconstructed networks may not capture the major regulatory rules.Here, we propose a novel approach called TENET to reconstruct the GRNs from scRNAseq data by calculating causal relationships between genes using transfer entropy (TE). We show that known target genes have significantly higher TE values. Genes with higher TE values were more affected by various perturbations. Comprehensive benchmarking showed that TENET outperformed other GRN prediction algorithms. More importantly, TENET is uniquely capable of identifying key regulators. Applying TENET to scRNAseq during embryonic stem cell differentiation to neural cells, we show that Nme2 is a critical factor for 2i condition specific stem cell self-renewal.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Alexander Wolf ◽  
Philipp Angerer ◽  
Fabian J. Theis

We present Scanpy, a scalable toolkit for analyzing single-cell gene expression data. It includes preprocessing, visualization, clustering, pseudotime and trajectory inference, differential expression testing and simulation of gene regulatory networks. The Python-based implementation efficiently deals with datasets of more than one million cells and enables easy interfacing of advanced machine learning packages. Code is available fromhttps://github.com/theislab/scanpy.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Océane Cassan ◽  
Sophie Lèbre ◽  
Antoine Martin

Abstract Background High-throughput transcriptomic datasets are often examined to discover new actors and regulators of a biological response. To this end, graphical interfaces have been developed and allow a broad range of users to conduct standard analyses from RNA-seq data, even with little programming experience. Although existing solutions usually provide adequate procedures for normalization, exploration or differential expression, more advanced features, such as gene clustering or regulatory network inference, often miss or do not reflect current state of the art methodologies. Results We developed here a user interface called DIANE (Dashboard for the Inference and Analysis of Networks from Expression data) designed to harness the potential of multi-factorial expression datasets from any organisms through a precise set of methods. DIANE interactive workflow provides normalization, dimensionality reduction, differential expression and ontology enrichment. Gene clustering can be performed and explored via configurable Mixture Models, and Random Forests are used to infer gene regulatory networks. DIANE also includes a novel procedure to assess the statistical significance of regulator-target influence measures based on permutations for Random Forest importance metrics. All along the pipeline, session reports and results can be downloaded to ensure clear and reproducible analyses. Conclusions We demonstrate the value and the benefits of DIANE using a recently published data set describing the transcriptional response of Arabidopsis thaliana under the combination of temperature, drought and salinity perturbations. We show that DIANE can intuitively carry out informative exploration and statistical procedures with RNA-Seq data, perform model based gene expression profiles clustering and go further into gene network reconstruction, providing relevant candidate genes or signalling pathways to explore. DIANE is available as a web service (https://diane.bpmp.inrae.fr), or can be installed and locally launched as a complete R package.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (158) ◽  
pp. 20190437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Posner ◽  
Reinhard Laubenbacher

MicroRNAs form a class of short, non-coding RNA molecules which are essential for proper development in tissue-based plants and animals. To help explain their role in gene regulation, a number of mathematical and computational studies have demonstrated the potential canalizing effects of microRNAs. However, such studies have typically focused on the effects of microRNAs on only one or a few target genes. Consequently, it remains unclear how these small-scale effects add up to the experimentally observed developmental outcomes resulting from microRNA perturbation at the whole-genome level. To answer this question, we built a general computational model of cell differentiation to study the effect of microRNAs in genome-scale gene regulatory networks. Our experiments show that in large gene regulatory networks, microRNAs can control differentiation time without significantly changing steady-state gene expression profiles. This temporal regulatory role cannot be naturally replicated using protein-based transcription factors alone. While several microRNAs have been shown to regulate differentiation time in vivo , our findings provide a new explanation of how the cumulative molecular actions of individual microRNAs influence genome-scale cellular dynamics. Taken together, these results may help explain why tissue-based organisms exclusively depend on miRNA-mediated regulation, while their more primitive counterparts do not.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document