scholarly journals BICORN: An R package for integrative inference of de novo cis-regulatory modules

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Chen

AbstractBICORN is an R package developed to integrate prior transcription factor binding information and gene expression data for cis-regulatory module (CRM) inference. BICORN searches for a list of candidate CRMs from binary bindings on potential target genes. Applying Gibbs sampling, BICORN samples CRMs for each gene using the fitting performance of transcription factor activities and regulation strengths of TFs in each CRM on gene expression. Consequently, sparse regulatory networks are inferred as functional CRMs regulating target genes. The BICORN package is implemented in R and is available at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BICORN/index.html.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Chen ◽  
Jinghua Gu ◽  
Andrew F. Neuwald ◽  
Leena Hilakivi-Clarke ◽  
Robert Clarke ◽  
...  

Abstract Genome-wide transcription factor (TF) binding signal analyses reveal co-localization of TF binding sites, based on which cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) can be inferred. CRMs play a key role in understanding the cooperation of multiple TFs under specific conditions. However, the functions of CRMs and their effects on nearby gene transcription are highly dynamic and context-specific and therefore are challenging to characterize. BICORN (Bayesian Inference of COoperative Regulatory Network) builds a hierarchical Bayesian model and infers context-specific CRMs based on TF-gene binding events and gene expression data for a particular cell type. BICORN automatically searches for a list of candidate CRMs based on the input TF bindings at regulatory regions associated with genes of interest. Applying Gibbs sampling, BICORN iteratively estimates model parameters of CRMs, TF activities, and corresponding regulation on gene transcription, which it models as a sparse network of functional CRMs regulating target genes. The BICORN package is implemented in R (version 3.4 or later) and is publicly available on the CRAN server at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BICORN/index.html.


F1000Research ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 1159
Author(s):  
Qian (Vicky) Wu ◽  
Wei Sun ◽  
Li Hsu

Gene expression data have been used to infer gene-gene networks (GGN) where an edge between two genes implies the conditional dependence of these two genes given all the other genes. Such gene-gene networks are of-ten referred to as gene regulatory networks since it may reveal expression regulation. Most of existing methods for identifying GGN employ penalized regression with L1 (lasso), L2 (ridge), or elastic net penalty, which spans the range of L1 to L2 penalty. However, for high dimensional gene expression data, a penalty that spans the range of L0 and L1 penalty, such as the log penalty, is often needed for variable selection consistency. Thus, we develop a novel method that em-ploys log penalty within the framework of an earlier network identification method space (Sparse PArtial Correlation Estimation), and implement it into a R package space-log. We show that the space-log is computationally efficient (source code implemented in C), and has good performance comparing with other methods, particularly for networks with hubs.Space-log is open source and available at GitHub, https://github.com/wuqian77/SpaceLog


Computation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Georgios N. Dimitrakopoulos

In Systems Biology, the complex relationships between different entities in the cells are modeled and analyzed using networks. Towards this aim, a rich variety of gene regulatory network (GRN) inference algorithms has been developed in recent years. However, most algorithms rely solely on gene expression data to reconstruct the network. Due to possible expression profile similarity, predictions can contain connections between biologically unrelated genes. Therefore, previously known biological information should also be considered by computational methods to obtain more consistent results, such as experimentally validated interactions between transcription factors and target genes. In this work, we propose XGBoost for gene regulatory networks (XGRN), a supervised algorithm, which combines gene expression data with previously known interactions for GRN inference. The key idea of our method is to train a regression model for each known interaction of the network and then utilize this model to predict new interactions. The regression is performed by XGBoost, a state-of-the-art algorithm using an ensemble of decision trees. In detail, XGRN learns a regression model based on gene expression of the two interactors and then provides predictions using as input the gene expression of other candidate interactors. Application on benchmark datasets and a real large single-cell RNA-Seq experiment resulted in high performance compared to other unsupervised and supervised methods, demonstrating the ability of XGRN to provide reliable predictions.


F1000Research ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 1159
Author(s):  
Qian (Vicky) Wu ◽  
Wei Sun ◽  
Li Hsu

Gene expression data have been used to infer gene-gene networks (GGN) where an edge between two genes implies the conditional dependence of these two genes given all the other genes. Such gene-gene networks are of-ten referred to as gene regulatory networks since it may reveal expression regulation. Most of existing methods for identifying GGN employ penalized regression with L1 (lasso), L2 (ridge), or elastic net penalty, which spans the range of L1 to L2 penalty. However, for high dimensional gene expression data, a penalty that spans the range of L0 and L1 penalty, such as the log penalty, is often needed for variable selection consistency. Thus, we develop a novel method that em-ploys log penalty within the framework of an earlier network identification method space (Sparse PArtial Correlation Estimation), and implement it into a R package space-log. We show that the space-log is computationally efficient (source code implemented in C), and has good performance comparing with other methods, particularly for networks with hubs.Space-log is open source and available at GitHub, https://github.com/wuqian77/SpaceLog


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Thomas Kelly ◽  
Michael A. Black

SummaryTranscriptomic analysis is used to capture the molecular state of a cell or sample in many biological and medical applications. In addition to identifying alterations in activity at the level of individual genes, understanding changes in the gene networks that regulate fundamental biological mechanisms is also an important objective of molecular analysis. As a result, databases that describe biological pathways are increasingly uesad to assist with the interpretation of results from large-scale genomics studies. Incorporating information from biological pathways and gene regulatory networks into a genomic data analysis is a popular strategy, and there are many methods that provide this functionality for gene expression data. When developing or comparing such methods, it is important to gain an accurate assessment of their performance. Simulation-based validation studies are frequently used for this. This necessitates the use of simulated data that correctly accounts for pathway relationships and correlations. Here we present a versatile statistical framework to simulate correlated gene expression data from biological pathways, by sampling from a multivariate normal distribution derived from a graph structure. This procedure has been released as the graphsim R package on CRAN and GitHub (https://github.com/TomKellyGenetics/graphsim) and is compatible with any graph structure that can be described using the igraph package. This package allows the simulation of biological pathways from a graph structure based on a statistical model of gene expression.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (05) ◽  
pp. 1250012 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHERINE AWAD ◽  
NICHOLAS PANCHY ◽  
SEE-KIONG NG ◽  
JIN CHEN

Living cells are realized by complex gene expression programs that are moderated by regulatory proteins called transcription factors (TFs). The TFs control the differential expression of target genes in the context of transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs), either individually or in groups. Deciphering the mechanisms of how the TFs control the differential expression of a target gene in a TRN is challenging, especially when multiple TFs collaboratively participate in the transcriptional regulation. To unravel the roles of the TFs in the regulatory networks, we model the underlying regulatory interactions in terms of the TF–target interactions' directions (activation or repression) and their corresponding logical roles (necessary and/or sufficient). We design a set of constraints that relate gene expression patterns to regulatory interaction models, and develop TRIM (Transcriptional Regulatory Interaction Model Inference), a new hidden Markov model, to infer the models of TF–target interactions in large-scale TRNs of complex organisms. Besides, by training TRIM with wild-type time-series gene expression data, the activation timepoints of each regulatory module can be obtained. To demonstrate the advantages of TRIM, we applied it on yeast TRN to infer the TF–target interaction models for individual TFs as well as pairs of TFs in collaborative regulatory modules. By comparing with TF knockout and other gene expression data, we were able to show that the performance of TRIM is clearly higher than DREM (the best existing algorithm). In addition, on an individual Arabidopsis binding network, we showed that the target genes' expression correlations can be significantly improved by incorporating the TF–target regulatory interaction models inferred by TRIM into the expression data analysis, which may introduce new knowledge in transcriptional dynamics and bioactivation.


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