An effective differential expression analysis of deep-sequencing data based on the Poisson log-normal model

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 1550001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Wu ◽  
Xiaodong Zhao ◽  
Zongli Lin ◽  
Zhifeng Shao

Tremendous amount of deep-sequencing data has unprecedentedly improved our understanding in biomedical science by digital sequence reads. To mine useful information from such data, a proper distribution for modeling all range of the count data and accurate parameter estimation are required. In this paper, we propose a method, called "DEPln," for differential expression analysis based on the Poisson log-normal (PLN) distribution with an accurate parameter estimation strategy, which aims to overcome the inconvenience in the mathematical analysis of the traditional PLN distribution. The performance of our proposed method is validated by both synthetic and real data. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms the traditional methods in terms of the discrimination ability and results in a good tradeoff between the recall rate and the precision. Thus, our work provides a new approach for gene expression analysis and has strong potential in deep-sequencing based research.

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xueyi Dong ◽  
Luyi Tian ◽  
Quentin Gouil ◽  
Hasaru Kariyawasam ◽  
Shian Su ◽  
...  

Abstract Application of Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ long-read sequencing platform to transcriptomic analysis is increasing in popularity. However, such analysis can be challenging due to the high sequence error and small library sizes, which decreases quantification accuracy and reduces power for statistical testing. Here, we report the analysis of two nanopore RNA-seq datasets with the goal of obtaining gene- and isoform-level differential expression information. A dataset of synthetic, spliced, spike-in RNAs (‘sequins’) as well as a mouse neural stem cell dataset from samples with a null mutation of the epigenetic regulator Smchd1 was analysed using a mix of long-read specific tools for preprocessing together with established short-read RNA-seq methods for downstream analysis. We used limma-voom to perform differential gene expression analysis, and the novel FLAMES pipeline to perform isoform identification and quantification, followed by DRIMSeq and limma-diffSplice (with stageR) to perform differential transcript usage analysis. We compared results from the sequins dataset to the ground truth, and results of the mouse dataset to a previous short-read study on equivalent samples. Overall, our work shows that transcriptomic analysis of long-read nanopore data using long-read specific preprocessing methods together with short-read differential expression methods and software that are already in wide use can yield meaningful results.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahul Reddy

As RNA-Seq and other high-throughput sequencing grow in use and remain critical for gene expression studies, technical variability in counts data impedes studies of differential expression studies, data across samples and experiments, or reproducing results. Studies like Dillies et al. (2013) compare several between-lane normalization methods involving scaling factors, while Hansen et al. (2012) and Risso et al. (2014) propose methods that correct for sample-specific bias or use sets of control genes to isolate and remove technical variability. This paper evaluates four normalization methods in terms of reducing intra-group, technical variability and facilitating differential expression analysis or other research where the biological, inter-group variability is of interest. To this end, the four methods were evaluated in differential expression analysis between data from Pickrell et al. (2010) and Montgomery et al. (2010) and between simulated data modeled on these two datasets. Though the between-lane scaling factor methods perform worse on real data sets, they are much stronger for simulated data. We cannot reject the recommendation of Dillies et al. to use TMM and DESeq normalization, but further study of power to detect effects of different size under each normalization method is merited.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alemu Takele Assefa ◽  
Katrijn De Paepe ◽  
Celine Everaert ◽  
Pieter Mestdagh ◽  
Olivier Thas ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTBackgroundProtein-coding RNAs (mRNA) have been the primary target of most transcriptome studies in the past, but in recent years, attention has expanded to include long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA). lncRNAs are typically expressed at low levels, and are inherently highly variable. This is a fundamental challenge for differential expression (DE) analysis. In this study, the performance of 14 popular tools for testing DE in RNA-seq data along with their normalization methods is comprehensively evaluated, with a particular focus on lncRNAs and low abundant mRNAs.ResultsThirteen performance metrics were used to evaluate DE tools and normalization methods using simulations and analyses of six diverse RNA-seq datasets. Non-parametric procedures are used to simulate gene expression data in such a way that realistic levels of expression and variability are preserved in the simulated data. Throughout the assessment, we kept track of the results for mRNA and lncRNA separately. All statistical models exhibited inferior performance for lncRNAs compared to mRNAs across all simulated scenarios and analysis of benchmark RNA-seq datasets. No single tool uniformly outperformed the others.ConclusionOverall, the linear modeling with empirical Bayes moderation (limma) and the nonparametric approach (SAMSeq) showed best performance: good control of the false discovery rate (FDR) and reasonable sensitivity. However, for achieving a sensitivity of at least 50%, more than 80 samples are required when studying expression levels in a realistic clinical settings such as in cancer research. About half of the methods showed severe excess of false discoveries, making these methods unreliable for differential expression analysis and jeopardizing reproducible science. The detailed results of our study can be consulted through a user-friendly web application, http://statapps.ugent.be/tools/AppDGE/


BMC Genomics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (S7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hung-I Harry Chen ◽  
Yuanhang Liu ◽  
Yi Zou ◽  
Zhao Lai ◽  
Devanand Sarkar ◽  
...  

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