scholarly journals Differential gene expression analysis tools exhibit substandard performance for long non-coding RNA–sequencing data

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/

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.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Gholizadeh ◽  
Zahra Salehi ◽  
Ali Mohammad banaei-Moghaddam ◽  
Abbas Rahimi Foroushani ◽  
Kaveh kavousi

AbstractWith the advent of the Next Generation Sequencing technologies, RNA-seq has become known as an optimal approach for studying gene expression profiling. Particularly, time course RNA-seq differential expression analysis has been used in many studies to identify candidate genes. However, applying a statistical method to efficiently identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in time course studies is challenging due to inherent characteristics of such data including correlation and dependencies over time. Here we aim to relatively compare EBSeq-HMM, a Hidden Markov-based model, with multiDE, a Log-Linear-based model, in a real time course RNA sequencing data. In order to conduct the comparison, common DEGs detected by edgeR, DESeq2 and Voom (referred to as Benchmark DEGs) were utilized as a measure. Each of the two models were compared using different normalization methods. The findings revealed that multiDE identified more Benchmark DEGs and showed a higher agreement with them than EBSeq-HMM. Furthermore, multiDE and EBSeq-HMM displayed their best performance using TMM and Upper-Quartile normalization methods, respectively.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. e0176185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohong Li ◽  
Guy N. Brock ◽  
Eric C. Rouchka ◽  
Nigel G. F. Cooper ◽  
Dongfeng Wu ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Federico Marini ◽  
Jan Linke ◽  
Harald Binder

AbstractBackgroundRNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is an ever increasingly popular tool for transcriptome profiling. A key point to make the best use of the available data is to provide software tools that are easy to use but still provide flexibility and transparency in the adopted methods. Despite the availability of many packages focused on detecting differential expression, a method to streamline this type of bioinformatics analysis in a comprehensive, accessible, and reproducible way is lacking.ResultsWe developed the ideal software package, which serves as a web application for interactive and reproducible RNA-seq analysis, while producing a wealth of visualizations to facilitate data interpretation. ideal is implemented in R using the Shiny framework, and is fully integrated with the existing core structures of the Bioconductor project. Users can perform the essential steps of the differential expression analysis work-flow in an assisted way, and generate a broad spectrum of publication-ready outputs, including diagnostic and summary visualizations in each module, all the way down to functional analysis. ideal also offers the possibility to seamlessly generate a full HTML report for storing and sharing results together with code for reproducibility.Conclusionideal is distributed as an R package in the Bioconductor project (http://bioconductor.org/packages/ideal/), and provides a solution for performing interactive and reproducible analyses of summarized RNA-seq expression data, empowering researchers with many different profiles (life scientists, clinicians, but also experienced bioinformaticians) to make the ideal use of the data at hand.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anish M.S. Shrestha ◽  
Joyce Emlyn B. Guiao ◽  
Kyle Christian R. Santiago

AbstractRNA-seq is being increasingly adopted for gene expression studies in a panoply of non-model organisms, with applications spanning the fields of agriculture, aquaculture, ecology, and environment. Conventional differential expression analysis for organisms without reference sequences requires performing computationally expensive and error-prone de-novo transcriptome assembly, followed by homology search against a high-confidence protein database for functional annotation. We propose a shortcut, where we obtain counts for differential expression analysis by directly aligning RNA-seq reads to the protein database. Through experiments on simulated and real data, we show drastic reductions in run-time and memory usage, with no loss in accuracy. A Snakemake implementation of our workflow is available at:https://bitbucket.org/project_samar/samar


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Marini ◽  
Jan Linke ◽  
Harald Binder

Abstract Background RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is an ever increasingly popular tool for transcriptome profiling. A key point to make the best use of the available data is to provide software tools that are easy to use but still provide flexibility and transparency in the adopted methods. Despite the availability of many packages focused on detecting differential expression, a method to streamline this type of bioinformatics analysis in a comprehensive, accessible, and reproducible way is lacking. Results We developed the software package, which serves as a web application for interactive and reproducible RNA-seq analysis, while producing a wealth of visualizations to facilitate data interpretation. is implemented in R using the Shiny framework, and is fully integrated with the existing core structures of the Bioconductor project. Users can perform the essential steps of the differential expression analysis workflow in an assisted way, and generate a broad spectrum of publication-ready outputs, including diagnostic and summary visualizations in each module, all the way down to functional analysis. also offers the possibility to seamlessly generate a full HTML report for storing and sharing results together with code for reproducibility. Conclusion is distributed as an R package in the Bioconductor project (http://bioconductor.org/packages/ideal/), and provides a solution for performing interactive and reproducible analyses of summarized RNA-seq expression data, empowering researchers with many different profiles (life scientists, clinicians, but also experienced bioinformaticians) to make the ideal use of the data at hand.


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

Background RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is a powerful tool for genome-wide expression profiling of biological samples with the advantage of high-throughput and high resolution. There are many existing algorithms nowadays for quantifying expression levels and detecting differential gene expression, but none of them takes the misaligned reads that are mapped to non-exonic regions into account. We developed a novel algorithm, XBSeq, where a statistical model was established based on the assumption that observed signals are the convolution of true expression signals and sequencing noises. The mapped reads in non-exonic regions are considered as sequencing noises, which follows a Poisson distribution. Given measureable observed and noise signals from RNA-seq data, true expression signals, assuming governed by the negative binomial distribution, can be delineated and thus the accurate detection of differential expressed genes. Results We implemented our novel XBSeq algorithm and evaluated it by using a set of simulated expression datasets under different conditions, using a combination of negative binomial and Poisson distributions with parameters derived from real RNA-seq data. We compared the performance of our method with other commonly used differential expression analysis algorithms. We also evaluated the changes in true and false positive rates with variations in biological replicates, differential fold changes, and expression levels in non-exonic regions. We also tested the algorithm on a set of real RNA-seq data where the common and different detection results from different algorithms were reported. Conclusions In this paper, we proposed a novel XBSeq, a differential expression analysis algorithm for RNA-seq data that takes non-exonic mapped reads into consideration. When background noise is at baseline level, the performance of XBSeq and DESeq are mostly equivalent. However, our method surpasses DESeq and other algorithms with the increase of non-exonic mapped reads. Only in very low read count condition XBSeq had a slightly higher false discovery rate, which may be improved by adjusting the background noise effect in this situation. Taken together, by considering non-exonic mapped reads, XBSeq can provide accurate expression measurement and thus detect differential expressed genes even in noisy conditions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aedan G. K. Roberts ◽  
Daniel R. Catchpoole ◽  
Paul J. Kennedy

AbstractBackgroundDifferential expression analysis of RNA-seq data has advanced rapidly since the introduction of the technology, and methods such as edgeR and DESeq2 have become standard parts of analysis pipelines. However, there is a growing body of research showing that differences in variability of gene expression or overall differences in the distribution of expression values – differential distribution – are also important both in normal biology and in diseases including cancer. Genes whose expression differs in distribution without a difference in mean expression level are ignored by differential expression methods.ResultsWe have developed a Bayesian hierarchical model which improves on existing methods for identifying differential dispersion in RNA-seq data, and provides an overall test for differential distribution. We have applied these methods to investigate differential dispersion and distribution in cancer using RNA-seq datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Our results show that differential dispersion and distribution are able to identify cancer-related genes. Further, we find that differential dispersion identifies cancer-related genes that are missed by differential expression analysis, and that differential expression and differential dispersion identify functionally distinct sets of genes.ConclusionThis work highlights the importance of considering changes beyond differences in mean in the analysis of gene expression data, and suggests that analysis of expression variability may provide insights into genetic aspects of cancer that would not be revealed by differential expression analysis alone. For identification of cancer-related genes, differential distribution analysis allows the identification of genes whose expression is disrupted in terms of either mean or variability.


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