scholarly journals Inferring Differential Networks by Integrating Gene Expression Data With Additional Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen Liu ◽  
Dehan Cai ◽  
WuCha Zeng ◽  
Yun Huang

Evidences increasingly indicate the involvement of gene network rewiring in disease development and cell differentiation. With the accumulation of high-throughput gene expression data, it is now possible to infer the changes of gene networks between two different states or cell types via computational approaches. However, the distribution diversity of multi-platform gene expression data and the sparseness and high noise rate of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data raise new challenges for existing differential network estimation methods. Furthermore, most existing methods are purely rely on gene expression data, and ignore the additional information provided by various existing biological knowledge. In this study, to address these challenges, we propose a general framework, named weighted joint sparse penalized D-trace model (WJSDM), to infer differential gene networks by integrating multi-platform gene expression data and multiple prior biological knowledge. Firstly, a non-paranormal graphical model is employed to tackle gene expression data with missing values. Then we propose a weighted group bridge penalty to integrate multi-platform gene expression data and various existing biological knowledge. Experiment results on synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in inferring differential networks. We apply our method to the gene expression data of ovarian cancer and the scRNA-seq data of circulating tumor cells of prostate cancer, and infer the differential network associated with platinum resistance of ovarian cancer and anti-androgen resistance of prostate cancer. By analyzing the estimated differential networks, we find some important biological insights about the mechanisms underlying platinum resistance of ovarian cancer and anti-androgen resistance of prostate cancer.

Author(s):  
Guro Dørum ◽  
Lars Snipen ◽  
Margrete Solheim ◽  
Solve Saebo

Gene set analysis methods have become a widely used tool for including prior biological knowledge in the statistical analysis of gene expression data. Advantages of these methods include increased sensitivity, easier interpretation and more conformity in the results. However, gene set methods do not employ all the available information about gene relations. Genes are arranged in complex networks where the network distances contain detailed information about inter-gene dependencies. We propose a method that uses gene networks to smooth gene expression data with the aim of reducing the number of false positives and identify important subnetworks. Gene dependencies are extracted from the network topology and are used to smooth genewise test statistics. To find the optimal degree of smoothing, we propose using a criterion that considers the correlation between the network and the data. The network smoothing is shown to improve the ability to identify important genes in simulated data. Applied to a real data set, the smoothing accentuates parts of the network with a high density of differentially expressed genes.


2004 ◽  
Vol 02 (01) ◽  
pp. 77-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEIYA IMOTO ◽  
TOMOYUKI HIGUCHI ◽  
TAKAO GOTO ◽  
KOUSUKE TASHIRO ◽  
SATORU KUHARA ◽  
...  

We propose a statistical method for estimating a gene network based on Bayesian networks from microarray gene expression data together with biological knowledge including protein-protein interactions, protein-DNA interactions, binding site information, existing literature and so on. Microarray data do not contain enough information for constructing gene networks accurately in many cases. Our method adds biological knowledge to the estimation method of gene networks under a Bayesian statistical framework, and also controls the trade-off between microarray information and biological knowledge automatically. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. We analyze Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene expression data as an application.


Author(s):  
Olga Lazareva ◽  
Jan Baumbach ◽  
Markus List ◽  
David B Blumenthal

Abstract In network and systems medicine, active module identification methods (AMIMs) are widely used for discovering candidate molecular disease mechanisms. To this end, AMIMs combine network analysis algorithms with molecular profiling data, most commonly, by projecting gene expression data onto generic protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks. Although active module identification has led to various novel insights into complex diseases, there is increasing awareness in the field that the combination of gene expression data and PPI network is problematic because up-to-date PPI networks have a very small diameter and are subject to both technical and literature bias. In this paper, we report the results of an extensive study where we analyzed for the first time whether widely used AMIMs really benefit from using PPI networks. Our results clearly show that, except for the recently proposed AMIM DOMINO, the tested AMIMs do not produce biologically more meaningful candidate disease modules on widely used PPI networks than on random networks with the same node degrees. AMIMs hence mainly learn from the node degrees and mostly fail to exploit the biological knowledge encoded in the edges of the PPI networks. This has far-reaching consequences for the field of active module identification. In particular, we suggest that novel algorithms are needed which overcome the degree bias of most existing AMIMs and/or work with customized, context-specific networks instead of generic PPI networks.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (05) ◽  
pp. 1250011
Author(s):  
NATALIA NOVOSELOVA ◽  
IGOR TOM

Many external and internal validity measures have been proposed in order to estimate the number of clusters in gene expression data but as a rule they do not consider the analysis of the stability of the groupings produced by a clustering algorithm. Based on the approach assessing the predictive power or stability of a partitioning, we propose the new measure of cluster validation and the selection procedure to determine the suitable number of clusters. The validity measure is based on the estimation of the "clearness" of the consensus matrix, which is the result of a resampling clustering scheme or consensus clustering. According to the proposed selection procedure the stable clustering result is determined with the reference to the validity measure for the null hypothesis encoding for the absence of clusters. The final number of clusters is selected by analyzing the distance between the validity plots for initial and permutated data sets. We applied the selection procedure to estimate the clustering results on several datasets. As a result the proposed procedure produced an accurate and robust estimate of the number of clusters, which are in agreement with the biological knowledge and gold standards of cluster quality.


Author(s):  
Crescenzio Gallo

The possible applications of modeling and simulation in the field of bioinformatics are very extensive, ranging from understanding basic metabolic paths to exploring genetic variability. Experimental results carried out with DNA microarrays allow researchers to measure expression levels for thousands of genes simultaneously, across different conditions and over time. A key step in the analysis of gene expression data is the detection of groups of genes that manifest similar expression patterns. In this chapter, the authors examine various methods for analyzing gene expression data, addressing the important topics of (1) selecting the most differentially expressed genes, (2) grouping them by means of their relationships, and (3) classifying samples based on gene expressions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suyan Tian ◽  
Chi Wang ◽  
Bing Wang

To analyze gene expression data with sophisticated grouping structures and to extract hidden patterns from such data, feature selection is of critical importance. It is well known that genes do not function in isolation but rather work together within various metabolic, regulatory, and signaling pathways. If the biological knowledge contained within these pathways is taken into account, the resulting method is a pathway-based algorithm. Studies have demonstrated that a pathway-based method usually outperforms its gene-based counterpart in which no biological knowledge is considered. In this article, a pathway-based feature selection is firstly divided into three major categories, namely, pathway-level selection, bilevel selection, and pathway-guided gene selection. With bilevel selection methods being regarded as a special case of pathway-guided gene selection process, we discuss pathway-guided gene selection methods in detail and the importance of penalization in such methods. Last, we point out the potential utilizations of pathway-guided gene selection in one active research avenue, namely, to analyze longitudinal gene expression data. We believe this article provides valuable insights for computational biologists and biostatisticians so that they can make biology more computable.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. BMI.S13729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chindo Hicks ◽  
Tejaswi Koganti ◽  
Shankar Giri ◽  
Memory Tekere ◽  
Ritika Ramani ◽  
...  

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have achieved great success in identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, herein called genetic variants) and genes associated with risk of developing prostate cancer. However, GWAS do not typically link the genetic variants to the disease state or inform the broader context in which the genetic variants operate. Here, we present a novel integrative genomics approach that combines GWAS information with gene expression data to infer the causal association between gene expression and the disease and to identify the network states and biological pathways enriched for genetic variants. We identified gene regulatory networks and biological pathways enriched for genetic variants, including the prostate cancer, IGF-1, JAK2, androgen, and prolactin signaling pathways. The integration of GWAS information with gene expression data provides insights about the broader context in which genetic variants associated with an increased risk of developing prostate cancer operate.


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