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Cancer driver genes, i.e., oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, are involved in the acquisition of important functions in tumors, providing a selective growth advantage, allowing uncontrolled proliferation and avoiding apoptosis. It is therefore important to identify these driver genes, both for the fundamental understanding of cancer and to help finding new therapeutic targets or biomarkers. Although the most frequently mutated driver genes have been identified, it is believed that many more remain to be discovered, particularly for driver genes specific to some cancer types. In this paper, we propose a new computational method called LOTUS to predict new driver genes. LOTUS is a machine-learning based approach which allows to integrate various types of data in a versatile manner, including information about gene mutations and protein-protein interactions. In addition, LOTUS can predict cancer driver genes in a pan-cancer setting as well as for specific cancer types, using a multitask learning strategy to share information across cancer types. We empirically show that LOTUS outperforms five other state-of-the-art driver gene prediction methods, both in terms of intrinsic consistency and prediction accuracy, and provide predictions of new cancer genes across many cancer types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging evidence has shown microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in human disease research. Identifying potential association among them is significant for the development of pathology, diagnose and therapy. However, only a tiny portion of all miRNA-disease pairs in the current datasets are experimentally validated. This prompts the development of high-precision computational methods to predict real interaction pairs. In this paper, we propose a new model of Logistic Model Tree for predicting miRNA-Disease Association (LMTRDA) by fusing multi-source information including miRNA sequences, miRNA functional similarity, disease semantic similarity, and known miRNA-disease associations. In particular, we introduce miRNA sequence information and extract its features using natural language processing technique for the first time in the miRNA-disease prediction model. In the cross-validation experiment, LMTRDA obtained 90.51% prediction accuracy with 92.55% sensitivity at the AUC of 90.54% on the HMDD V3.0 dataset. To further evaluate the performance of LMTRDA, we compared it with different classifier and feature descriptor models. In addition, we also validate the predictive ability of LMTRDA in human diseases including Breast Neoplasms, Breast Neoplasms and Lymphoma. As a result, 28, 27 and 26 out of the top 30 miRNAs associated with these diseases were verified by experiments in different kinds of case studies. These experimental results demonstrate that LMTRDA is a reliable model for predicting the association among miRNAs and diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robustly predicting outcome for cancer patients from gene expression is an important challenge on the road to better personalized treatment. Network-based outcome predictors (NOPs), which considers the cellular wiring diagram in the classification, hold much promise to improve performance, stability and interpretability of identified marker genes. Problematically, reports on the efficacy of NOPs are conflicting and for instance suggest that utilizing random networks performs on par to networks that describe biologically relevant interactions. In this paper we turn the prediction problem around: instead of using a given biological network in the NOP, we aim to identify the network of genes that truly improves outcome prediction. To this end, we propose SyNet, a gene network constructed ab initio from synergistic gene pairs derived from survival-labelled gene expression data. To obtain SyNet, we evaluate synergy for all 69 million pairwise combinations of genes resulting in a network that is specific to the dataset and phenotype under study and can be used to in a NOP model. We evaluated SyNet and 11 other networks on a compendium dataset of >4000 survival-labelled breast cancer samples. For this purpose, we used cross-study validation which more closely emulates real world application of these outcome predictors. We find that SyNet is the only network that truly improves performance, stability and interpretability in several existing NOPs. We show that SyNet overlaps significantly with existing gene networks, and can be confidently predicted (~85% AUC) from graph-topological descriptions of these networks, in particular the breast tissue-specific network. Due to its data-driven nature, SyNet is not biased to well-studied genes and thus facilitates post-hoc interpretation. We find that SyNet is highly enriched for known breast cancer genes and genes related to e.g. histological grade and tamoxifen resistance, suggestive of a role in determining breast cancer outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LncRNA-protein interactions play important roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation, poly-adenylation, splicing and translation. Identification of lncRNA-protein interactions helps to understand lncRNA-related activities. Existing computational methods utilize multiple lncRNA features or multiple protein features to predict lncRNA-protein interactions, but features are not available for all lncRNAs or proteins; most of existing methods are not capable of predicting interacting proteins (or lncRNAs) for new lncRNAs (or proteins), which don’t have known interactions. In this paper, we propose the sequence-based feature projection ensemble learning method, “SFPEL-LPI”, to predict lncRNA-protein interactions. First, SFPEL-LPI extracts lncRNA sequence-based features and protein sequence-based features. Second, SFPEL-LPI calculates multiple lncRNA-lncRNA similarities and protein-protein similarities by using lncRNA sequences, protein sequences and known lncRNA-protein interactions. Then, SFPEL-LPI combines multiple similarities and multiple features with a feature projection ensemble learning frame. In computational experiments, SFPEL-LPI accurately predicts lncRNA-protein associations and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, SFPEL-LPI can be applied to new lncRNAs (or proteins). The case studies demonstrate that our method can find out novel lncRNA-protein interactions, which are confirmed by literature. Finally, we construct a user-friendly web server, available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B cells develop high affinity receptors during the course of affinity maturation, a cyclic process of mutation and selection. At the end of affinity maturation, a number of cells sharing the same ancestor (i.e. in the same “clonal family”) are released from the germinal center; their amino acid frequency profile reflects the allowed and disallowed substitutions at each position. These clonal-family-specific frequency profiles, called “substitution profiles”, are useful for studying the course of affinity maturation as well as for antibody engineering purposes. However, most often only a single sequence is recovered from each clonal family in a sequencing experiment, making it impossible to construct a clonal-family-specific substitution profile. Given the public release of many high-quality large B cell receptor datasets, one may ask whether it is possible to use such data in a prediction model for clonal-family-specific substitution profiles. In this paper, we present the method “Substitution Profiles Using Related Families” (SPURF), a penalized tensor regression framework that integrates information from a rich assemblage of datasets to predict the clonal-family-specific substitution profile for any single input sequence. Using this framework, we show that substitution profiles from similar clonal families can be leveraged together with simulated substitution profiles and germline gene sequence information to improve prediction. We fit this model on a large public dataset and validate the robustness of our approach on two external datasets. Furthermore, we provide a command-line tool in an open-source software package () implementing these ideas and providing easy prediction using our pre-fit models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-throughput data generation platforms, like mass-spectrometry, microarrays, and second-generation sequencing are susceptible to batch effects due to run-to-run variation in reagents, equipment, protocols, or personnel. Currently, batch correction methods are not commonly applied to microbiome sequencing datasets. In this paper, we compare different batch-correction methods applied to microbiome case-control studies. We introduce a model-free normalization procedure where features (i.e. bacterial taxa) in case samples are converted to percentiles of the equivalent features in control samples within a study prior to pooling data across studies. We look at how this percentile-normalization method compares to traditional meta-analysis methods for combining independent p-values and to limma and ComBat, widely used batch-correction models developed for RNA microarray data. Overall, we show that percentile-normalization is a simple, non-parametric approach for correcting batch effects and improving sensitivity in case-control meta-analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) in microbial organisms have the potential to vastly improve the way we understand, manage, and treat infectious diseases. Yet, microbial GWAS methods established thus far remain insufficiently able to capitalise on the growing wealth of bacterial and viral genetic sequence data. Facing clonal population structure and homologous recombination, existing GWAS methods struggle to achieve both the precision necessary to reject spurious findings and the power required to detect associations in microbes. In this paper, we introduce a novel phylogenetic approach that has been tailor-made for microbial GWAS, which is applicable to organisms ranging from purely clonal to frequently recombining, and to both binary and continuous phenotypes. Our approach is robust to the confounding effects of both population structure and recombination, while maintaining high statistical power to detect associations. Thorough testing via application to simulated data provides strong support for the power and specificity of our approach and demonstrates the advantages offered over alternative cluster-based and dimension-reduction methods. Two applications to Neisseria meningitidis illustrate the versatility and potential of our method, confirming previously-identified penicillin resistance loci and resulting in the identification of both well-characterised and novel drivers of invasive disease. Our method is implemented as an open-source R package called treeWAS which is freely available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complex disease has, by definition, multiple genetic causes. In theory, these causes could be identified individually, but their identification will likely benefit from informed use of anticipated interactions between causes. In addition, characterizing and understanding interactions must be considered key to revealing the etiology of any complex disease. Large-scale collaborative efforts are now paving the way for comprehensive studies of interaction. As a consequence, there is a need for methods with a computational efficiency sufficient for modern data sets as well as for improvements of statistical accuracy and power. Another issue is that, currently, the relation between different methods for interaction inference is in many cases not transparent, complicating the comparison and interpretation of results between different interaction studies. In this paper we present computationally efficient tests of interaction for the complete family of generalized linear models (GLMs). The tests can be applied for inference of single or multiple interaction parameters, but we show, by simulation, that jointly testing the full set of interaction parameters yields superior power and control of false positive rate. Based on these tests we also describe how to combine results from multiple independent studies of interaction in a meta-analysis. We investigate the impact of several assumptions commonly made when modeling interactions. We also show that, across the important class of models with a full set of interaction parameters, jointly testing the interaction parameters yields identical results. Further, we apply our method to genetic data for cardiovascular disease. This allowed us to identify a putative interaction involved in Lp(a) plasma levels between two ‘tag’ variants in the LPA locus (p = 2.42 ⋅ 10−09) as well as replicate the interaction (p = 6.97 ⋅ 10−07). Finally, our meta-analysis method is used in a small (N = 16,181) study of interactions in myocardial infarction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shotgun metagenomic analysis of the human associated microbiome provides a rich set of microbial features for prediction and biomarker discovery in the context of human diseases and health conditions. However, the use of such high-resolution microbial features presents new challenges, and validated computational tools for learning tasks are lacking. Moreover, classification rules have scarcely been validated in independent studies, posing questions about the generality and generalization of disease-predictive models across cohorts. In this paper, we comprehensively assess approaches to metagenomics-based prediction tasks and for quantitative assessment of the strength of potential microbiome-phenotype associations. We develop a computational framework for prediction tasks using quantitative microbiome profiles, including species-level relative abundances and presence of strain-specific markers. A comprehensive meta-analysis, with particular emphasis on generalization across cohorts, was performed in a collection of 2424 publicly available metagenomic samples from eight large-scale studies. Cross-validation revealed good disease-prediction capabilities, which were in general improved by feature selection and use of strain-specific markers instead of species-level taxonomic abundance. In cross-study analysis, models transferred between studies were in some cases less accurate than models tested by within-study cross-validation. Interestingly, the addition of healthy (control) samples from other studies to training sets improved disease prediction capabilities. Some microbial species (most notably Streptococcus anginosus) seem to characterize general dysbiotic states of the microbiome rather than connections with a specific disease. Our results in modelling features of the “healthy” microbiome can be considered a first step toward defining general microbial dysbiosis. The software framework, microbiome profiles, and metadata for thousands of samples are publicly available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic constructs in biotechnology, biocomputing, and modern gene therapy interventions are often based on plasmids or transfected circuits which implement some form of “on-off” switch. For example, the expression of a protein used for therapeutic purposes might be triggered by the recognition of a specific combination of inducers (e.g., antigens), and memory of this event should be maintained across a cell population until a specific stimulus commands a coordinated shut-off. The robustness of such a design is hampered by molecular (“intrinsic”) or environmental (“extrinsic”) noise, which may lead to spontaneous changes of state in a subset of the population and is reflected in the bimodality of protein expression, as measured for example using flow cytometry. In this context, a “majority-vote” correction circuit, which brings deviant cells back into the required state, is highly desirable, and quorum-sensing has been suggested as a way for cells to broadcast their states to the population as a whole so as to facilitate consensus. In this paper, we propose what we believe is the first such a design that has mathematically guaranteed properties of stability and auto-correction under certain conditions. Our approach is guided by concepts and theory from the field of “monotone” dynamical systems developed by M. Hirsch, H. Smith, and others. We benchmark our design by comparing it to an existing design which has been the subject of experimental and theoretical studies, illustrating its superiority in stability and self-correction of synchronization errors. Our stability analysis, based on dynamical systems theory, guarantees global convergence to steady states, ruling out unpredictable (“chaotic”) behaviors and even sustained oscillations in the limit of convergence. These results are valid no matter what are the values of parameters, and are based only on the wiring diagram. The theory is complemented by extensive computational bifurcation analysis, performed for a biochemically-detailed and biologically-relevant model that we developed. Another novel feature of our approach is that our theorems on exponential stability of steady states for homogeneous or mixed populations are valid independently of the number N of cells in the population, which is usually very large (N ≫ 1) and unknown. We prove that the exponential stability depends on relative proportions of each type of state only. While monotone systems theory has been used previously for systems biology analysis, the current work illustrates its power for synthetic biology design, and thus has wider significance well beyond the application to the important problem of coordination of toggle switches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic risk prediction is an important goal in human genetics research and precision medicine. Accurate prediction models will have great impacts on both disease prevention and early treatment strategies. Despite the identification of thousands of disease-associated genetic variants through genome wide association studies (GWAS), genetic risk prediction accuracy remains moderate for most diseases, which is largely due to the challenges in both identifying all the functionally relevant variants and accurately estimating their effect sizes in the presence of linkage disequilibrium. In this paper, we introduce AnnoPred, a principled framework that leverages diverse types of genomic and epigenomic functional annotations in genetic risk prediction for complex diseases. AnnoPred is trained using GWAS summary statistics in a Bayesian framework in which we explicitly model various functional annotations and allow for linkage disequilibrium estimated from reference genotype data. Compared with state-of-the-art risk prediction methods, AnnoPred achieves consistently improved prediction accuracy in both extensive simulations and real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately predicting and testing the types of Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) of each patient using cost-effective microarray-based expression data and machine learning algorithms could greatly help either identifying the most targeting medicine or adopting other therapeutic measures that could correct/restore defective genetic signaling at the early stage. Furthermore, the prediction model construction processes can also help identifying highly informative genes controlling PAH, leading to enhanced understanding of the disease etiology and molecular pathways. In this study, we used several different gene filtering methods based on microarray expression data obtained from a high-quality patient PAH dataset. Following that, we proposed a novel feature selection and refinement algorithm in conjunction with well-known machine learning methods to identify a small set of highly informative genes. Results indicated that clusters of small-expression genes could be extremely informative at predicting and differentiating different forms of PAH. Additionally, our proposed novel feature refinement algorithm could lead to significant enhancement in model performance. To summarize, integrated with state-of-the-art machine learning and novel feature refining algorithms, the most accurate models could provide near-perfect classification accuracies using very few (close to ten) low-expression genes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is mainly caused by somatic genome alterations (SGAs). Precision oncology involves identifying and targeting tumor-specific aberrations resulting from causative SGAs. We developed a novel tumor-specific computational framework that finds the likely causative SGAs in an individual tumor and estimates their impact on oncogenic processes, which suggests the disease mechanisms that are acting in that tumor. This information can be used to guide precision oncology. We report a tumor-specific causal inference (TCI) framework, which estimates causative SGAs by modeling causal relationships between SGAs and molecular phenotypes (e.g., transcriptomic, proteomic, or metabolomic changes) within an individual tumor. We applied the TCI algorithm to tumors from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and estimated for each tumor the SGAs that causally regulate the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in that tumor. Overall, TCI identified 634 SGAs that are predicted to cause cancer-related DEGs in a significant number of tumors, including most of the previously known drivers and many novel candidate cancer drivers. The inferred causal relationships are statistically robust and biologically sensible, and multiple lines of experimental evidence support the predicted functional impact of both the well-known and the novel candidate drivers that are predicted by TCI. TCI provides a unified framework that integrates multiple types of SGAs and molecular phenotypes to estimate which genome perturbations are causally influencing one or more molecular/cellular phenotypes in an individual tumor. By identifying major candidate drivers and revealing their functional impact in an individual tumor, TCI sheds light on the disease mechanisms of that tumor, which can serve to advance our basic knowledge of cancer biology and to support precision oncology that provides tailored treatment of individual tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network medicine approaches have been largely successful at increasing our knowledge of molecularly characterized diseases. Given a set of disease genes associated with a disease, neighbourhood-based methods and random walkers exploit the interactome allowing the prediction of further genes for that disease. In general, however, diseases with no known molecular basis constitute a challenge. Here we present a novel network approach to prioritize gene-disease associations that is able to also predict genes for diseases with no known molecular basis. Our method, which we have called Cardigan (ChARting DIsease Gene AssociatioNs), uses semi-supervised learning and exploits a measure of similarity between disease phenotypes. We evaluated its performance at predicting genes for both molecularly characterized and uncharacterized diseases in OMIM, using both weighted and binary interactomes, and compared it with state-of-the-art methods. Our tests, which use datasets collected at different points in time to replicate the dynamics of the disease gene discovery process, prove that Cardigan is able to accurately predict disease genes for molecularly uncharacterized diseases. Additionally, standard leave-one-out cross validation tests show how our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods at predicting genes for molecularly characterized diseases by 14%-65%. Cardigan can also be used for disease module prediction, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 87%-299%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the highly dynamic and complex nature of the human gut microbial community, the ability to identify and predict time-dependent compositional patterns of microbes is crucial to our understanding of the structure and functions of this ecosystem. One factor that could affect such time-dependent patterns is microbial interactions, wherein community composition at a given time point affects the microbial composition at a later time point. However, the field has not yet settled on the degree of this effect. Specifically, it has been recently suggested that only a minority of taxa depend on the microbial composition in earlier times. To address the issue of identifying and predicting temporal microbial patterns we developed a new model, MTV-LMM (Microbial Temporal Variability Linear Mixed Model), a linear mixed model for the prediction of microbial community temporal dynamics. MTV-LMM can identify time-dependent microbes (i.e., microbes whose abundance can be predicted based on the previous microbial composition) in longitudinal studies, which can then be used to analyze the trajectory of the microbiome over time. We evaluated the performance of MTV-LMM on real and synthetic time series datasets, and found that MTV-LMM outperforms commonly used methods for microbiome time series modeling. Particularly, we demonstrate that the effect of the microbial composition in previous time points on the abundance of taxa at later time points is underestimated by a factor of at least 10 when applying previous approaches. Using MTV-LMM, we demonstrate that a considerable portion of the human gut microbiome, both in infants and adults, has a significant time-dependent component that can be predicted based on microbiome composition in earlier time points. This suggests that microbiome composition at a given time point is a major factor in defining future microbiome composition and that this phenomenon is considerably more common than previously reported for the human gut microbiome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differentiation between phenotypically neutral and disease-causing genetic variation remains an open and relevant problem. Among different types of variation, non-frameshifting insertions and deletions (indels) represent an understudied group with widespread phenotypic consequences. To address this challenge, we present a machine learning method, MutPred-Indel, that predicts pathogenicity and identifies types of functional residues impacted by non-frameshifting insertion/deletion variation. The model shows good predictive performance as well as the ability to identify impacted structural and functional residues including secondary structure, intrinsic disorder, metal and macromolecular binding, post-translational modifications, allosteric sites, and catalytic residues. We identify structural and functional mechanisms impacted preferentially by germline variation from the Human Gene Mutation Database, recurrent somatic variation from COSMIC in the context of different cancers, as well as de novo variants from families with autism spectrum disorder. Further, the distributions of pathogenicity prediction scores generated by MutPred-Indel are shown to differentiate highly recurrent from non-recurrent somatic variation. Collectively, we present a framework to facilitate the interrogation of both pathogenicity and the functional effects of non-frameshifting insertion/deletion variants. The MutPred-Indel webserver is available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drug screening studies typically involve assaying the sensitivity of a range of cancer cell lines across an array of anti-cancer therapeutics. Alongside these sensitivity measurements high dimensional molecular characterizations of the cell lines are typically available, including gene expression, copy number variation and genomic mutations. We propose a sparse multitask regression model which learns discriminative latent characteristics that predict drug sensitivity and are associated with specific molecular features. We use ideas from Bayesian nonparametrics to automatically infer the appropriate number of these latent characteristics. The resulting analysis couples high predictive performance with interpretability since each latent characteristic involves a typically small set of drugs, cell lines and genomic features. Our model uncovers a number of drug-gene sensitivity associations missed by single gene analyses. We functionally validate one such novel association: that increased expression of the cell-cycle regulator C/EBPδ decreases sensitivity to the histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor panobinostat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many biological problems involve the response to multiple perturbations. Examples include response to combinations of many drugs, and the effects of combinations of many mutations. Such problems have an exponentially large space of combinations, which makes it infeasible to cover the entire space experimentally. To overcome this problem, several formulae that predict the effect of drug combinations or fitness landscape values have been proposed. These formulae use the effects of single perturbations and pairs of perturbations to predict triplets and higher order combinations. Interestingly, different formulae perform best on different datasets. Here we use Pareto optimality theory to quantitatively explain why no formula is optimal for all datasets, due to an inherent bias-variance (noise-precision) tradeoff. We calculate the Pareto front of log-linear formulae and find that the optimal formula depends on properties of the dataset: the typical interaction strength and the experimental noise. This study provides an approach to choose a suitable prediction formula for a given dataset, in order to best overcome the combinatorial explosion problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents the ten rules for carrying out and writing meta-analysis. The rules for the development of meta-analyses that were discussed include specifying topic and type of the meta-analysis, following available guidelines for different types of meta-analyses and establishing inclusion criterion and defining key variables.

Neural systems are organized in a modular way, serving multiple functionalities. This multiplicity requires that both positive (e.g. excitatory, phase-coherent) and negative (e.g. inhibitory, phase-opposing) interactions take place across brain modules. Unfortunately, most methods to detect modules from time series either neglect or convert to positive, any measured negative correlation. This may leave a significant part of the sign-dependent functional structure undetected. Here we present a novel method, based on random matrix theory, for the identification of sign-dependent modules in the brain. Our method filters out both local (unit-specific) noise and global (system-wide) dependencies that typically obfuscate the presence of such structure. The method is guaranteed to identify an optimally contrasted functional ‘signature’, i.e. a partition into modules that are positively correlated internally and negatively correlated across. The method is purely data-driven, does not use any arbitrary threshold or network projection, and outputs only statistically significant structure. In measurements of neuronal gene expression in the biological clock of mice, the method systematically uncovers two otherwise undetectable, negatively correlated modules whose relative size and mutual interaction strength are found to depend on photoperiod. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gestational alcohol exposure causes fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) and is a prominent cause of neurodevelopmental disability. Whole transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) offer insights into mechanisms underlying FASD, but gene-level analysis provides limited information regarding complex transcriptional processes such as alternative splicing and non-coding RNAs. Moreover, traditional analytical approaches that use multiple hypothesis testing with a false discovery rate adjustment prioritize genes based on an adjusted p-value, which is not always biologically relevant. We address these limitations with a novel approach and implemented an unsupervised machine learning model, which we applied to an exon-level analysis to reduce data complexity to the most likely functionally relevant exons, without loss of novel information. This was performed on an RNA-Seq paired-end dataset derived from alcohol-exposed neural fold-stage chick crania, wherein alcohol causes facial deficits recapitulating those of FASD. A principal component analysis along with k-means clustering was utilized to extract exons that deviated from baseline expression. This identified 6857 differentially expressed exons representing 1251 geneIDs; 391 of these genes were identified in a prior gene-level analysis of this dataset. It also identified exons encoding 23 microRNAs (miRNAs) having significantly differential expression profiles in response to alcohol. We developed an RDAVID pipeline to identify KEGG pathways represented by these exons, and separately identified predicted KEGG pathways targeted by these miRNAs. Several of these (ribosome biogenesis, oxidative phosphorylation) were identified in our prior gene-level analysis. Other pathways are crucial to facial morphogenesis and represent both novel (focal adhesion, FoxO signaling, insulin signaling) and known (Wnt signaling) alcohol targets. Importantly, there was substantial overlap between the exomes themselves and the predicted miRNA targets, suggesting these miRNAs contribute to the gene-level expression changes. Our novel application of unsupervised machine learning in conjunction with statistical analyses facilitated the discovery of signaling pathways and miRNAs that inform mechanisms underlying FASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small sample sizes combined with high person-to-person variability can make it difficult to detect significant gene expression changes from transcriptional profiling studies. Subtle, but coordinated, gene expression changes may be detected using gene set analysis approaches. Meta-analysis is another approach to increase the power to detect biologically relevant changes by integrating information from multiple studies. Here, we present a framework that combines both approaches and allows for meta-analysis of gene sets. QuSAGE meta-analysis extends our previously published QuSAGE framework, which offers several advantages for gene set analysis, including fully accounting for gene-gene correlations and quantifying gene set activity as a full probability density function. Application of QuSAGE meta-analysis to influenza vaccination response shows it can detect significant activity that is not apparent in individual studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Endogenous Retrovirus type K (HERV-K) is the only HERV known to be insertionally polymorphic; not all individuals have a retrovirus at a specific genomic location. It is possible that HERV-Ks contribute to human disease because people differ in both number and genomic location of these retroviruses. Indeed viral transcripts, proteins, and antibody against HERV-K are detected in cancers, auto-immune, and neurodegenerative diseases. However, attempts to link a polymorphic HERV-K with any disease have been frustrated in part because population prevalence of HERV-K provirus at each polymorphic site is lacking and it is challenging to identify closely related elements such as HERV-K from short read sequence data. We present an integrated and computationally robust approach that uses whole genome short read data to determine the occupation status at all sites reported to contain a HERV-K provirus. Our method estimates the proportion of fixed length genomic sequence (k-mers) from whole genome sequence data matching a reference set of k-mers unique to each HERV-K locus and applies mixture model-based clustering of these values to account for low depth sequence data. Our analysis of 1000 Genomes Project Data (KGP) reveals numerous differences among the five KGP super-populations in the prevalence of individual and co-occurring HERV-K proviruses; we provide a visualization tool to easily depict the proportion of the KGP populations with any combination of polymorphic HERV-K provirus. Further, because HERV-K is insertionally polymorphic, the genome burden of known polymorphic HERV-K is variable in humans; this burden is lowest in East Asian (EAS) individuals. Our study identifies population-specific sequence variation for HERV-K proviruses at several loci. We expect these resources will advance research on HERV-K contributions to human diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rare variants are of increasing interest to genetic association studies because of their etiological contributions to human complex diseases. Due to the rarity of the mutant events, rare variants are routinely analyzed on an aggregate level. While aggregation analyses improve the detection of global-level signal, they are not able to pinpoint causal variants within a variant set. To perform inference on a localized level, additional information, e.g., biological annotation, is often needed to boost the information content of a rare variant. Following the observation that important variants are likely to cluster together on functional domains, we propose a rte structure guided local est (POINT) to provide variant-specific association information using structure-guided aggregation of signal. Constructed under a kernel machine framework, POINT performs local association testing by borrowing information from neighboring variants in the 3-dimensional protein space in a data-adaptive fashion. Besides merely providing a list of promising variants, POINT assigns each variant a p-value to permit variant ranking and prioritization. We assess the selection performance of POINT using simulations and illustrate how it can be used to prioritize individual rare variants in PCSK9, ANGPTL4 and CETP in the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) clinical trial data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next-Generation Sequencing has made available substantial amounts of large-scale Omics data, providing unprecedented opportunities to understand complex biological systems. Specifically, the value of RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) data has been confirmed in inferring how gene regulatory systems will respond under various conditions (bulk data) or cell types (single-cell data). RNA-Seq can generate genome-scale gene expression profiles that can be further analyzed using correlation analysis, co-expression analysis, clustering, differential gene expression (DGE), among many other studies. While these analyses can provide invaluable information related to gene expression, integration and interpretation of the results can prove challenging. Here we present a tool called IRIS-EDA, which is a Shiny web server for expression data analysis. It provides a straightforward and user-friendly platform for performing numerous computational analyses on user-provided RNA-Seq or Single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) data. Specifically, three commonly used R packages (edgeR, DESeq2, and limma) are implemented in the DGE analysis with seven unique experimental design functionalities, including a user-specified design matrix option. Seven discovery-driven methods and tools (correlation analysis, heatmap, clustering, biclustering, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), and t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE)) are provided for gene expression exploration which is useful for designing experimental hypotheses and determining key factors for comprehensive DGE analysis. Furthermore, this platform integrates seven visualization tools in a highly interactive manner, for improved interpretation of the analyses. It is noteworthy that, for the first time, IRIS-EDA provides a framework to expedite submission of data and results to NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus following the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) Data Principles. IRIS-EDA is freely available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New approaches to lineage tracking have allowed the study of differentiation in multicellular organisms over many generations of cells. Understanding the phenotypic variability observed in these lineage trees requires new statistical methods. Whereas an invariant cell lineage, such as that for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, can be described by a lineage map, defined as the pattern of phenotypes overlaid onto the binary tree, a traditional lineage map is static and does not describe the variability inherent in the cell lineages of higher organisms. Here, we introduce lineage variability maps which describe the pattern of second-order variation in lineage trees. These maps can be undirected graphs of the partial correlations between every lineal position, or directed graphs showing the dynamics of bifurcated patterns in each subtree. We show how to infer these graphical models for lineages of any depth from sample sizes of only a few pedigrees. This required developing the generalized spectral analysis for a binary tree, the natural framework for describing tree-structured variation. When tested on pedigrees from C. elegans expressing a marker for pharyngeal differentiation potential, the variability maps recover essential features of the known lineage map. When applied to highly-variable pedigrees monitoring cell size in T lymphocytes, the maps show that most of the phenotype is set by the founder naive T cell. Lineage variability maps thus elevate the concept of the lineage map to the population level, addressing questions about the potency and dynamics of cell lineages and providing a way to quantify the progressive restriction of cell fate with increasing depth in the tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metabolomics is a powerful approach for discovering biomarkers and for characterizing the biochemical consequences of genetic variation. While untargeted metabolite profiling can measure thousands of signals in a single experiment, many biologically meaningful signals cannot be readily identified as known metabolites nor compared across datasets, making it difficult to infer biology and to conduct well-powered meta-analyses across studies. To overcome these challenges, we developed a suite of computational methods, PAIRUP-MS, to match metabolite signals across mass spectrometry-based profiling datasets and to generate metabolic pathway annotations for these signals. To pair up signals measured in different datasets, where retention times (RT) are often not comparable or even available, we implemented an imputation-based approach that only requires mass-to-charge ratios (m/z). As validation, we treated each shared known metabolite as an unmatched signal and showed that PAIRUP-MS correctly matched 70–88% of these metabolites from among thousands of signals, equaling or outperforming a standard m/z- and RT-based approach. We performed further validation using genetic data: the most stringent set of matched signals and shared knowns showed comparable consistency of genetic associations across datasets. Next, we developed a pathway reconstitution method to annotate unknown signals using curated metabolic pathways containing known metabolites. We performed genetic validation for the generated annotations, showing that annotated signals associated with gene variants were more likely to be enriched for pathways functionally related to the genes compared to random expectation. Finally, we applied PAIRUP-MS to study associations between metabolites and genetic variants or body mass index (BMI) across multiple datasets, identifying up to ~6 times more significant signals and many more BMI-associated pathways compared to the standard practice of only analyzing known metabolites. These results demonstrate that PAIRUP-MS enables analysis of unknown signals in a robust, biologically meaningful manner and provides a path to more comprehensive, well-powered studies of untargeted metabolomics data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of machine learning-based predictors have been developed for identifying immunogenic T-cell epitopes based on major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I and II binding affinities. Rationally selecting the most appropriate tool has been complicated by the evolving training data and machine learning methods. Despite the recent advances made in generating high-quality MHC-eluted, naturally processed ligandome, the reliability of new predictors on these epitopes has yet to be evaluated. This study reports the latest benchmarking on an extensive set of MHC-binding predictors by using newly available, untested data of both synthetic and naturally processed epitopes. 32 human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I and 24 HLA class II alleles are included in the blind test set. Artificial neural network (ANN)-based approaches demonstrated better performance than regression-based machine learning and structural modeling. Among the 18 predictors benchmarked, ANN-based mhcflurry and nn_align perform the best for MHC class I 9-mer and class II 15-mer predictions, respectively, on binding/non-binding classification (Area Under Curves = 0.911). NetMHCpan4 also demonstrated comparable predictive power. Our customization of mhcflurry to a pan-HLA predictor has achieved similar accuracy to NetMHCpan. The overall accuracy of these methods are comparable between 9-mer and 10-mer testing data. However, the top methods deliver low correlations between the predicted versus the experimental affinities for strong MHC binders. When used on naturally processed MHC-ligands, tools that have been trained on elution data (NetMHCpan4 and MixMHCpred) shows better accuracy than pure binding affinity predictor. The variability of false prediction rate is considerable among HLA types and datasets. Finally, structure-based predictor of Rosetta FlexPepDock is less optimal compared to the machine learning approaches. With our benchmarking of MHC-binding and MHC-elution predictors using a comprehensive metrics, a unbiased view for establishing best practice of T-cell epitope predictions is presented, facilitating future development of methods in immunogenomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed an easy-to-use and memory-efficient method called PhenotypeSeeker that (a) identifies phenotype-specific k-mers, (b) generates a k-mer-based statistical model for predicting a given phenotype and (c) predicts the phenotype from the sequencing data of a given bacterial isolate. The method was validated on 167 Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates (virulence), 200 Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates (ciprofloxacin resistance) and 459 Clostridium difficile isolates (azithromycin resistance). The phenotype prediction models trained from these datasets obtained the F1-measure of 0.88 on the K. pneumoniae test set, 0.88 on the P. aeruginosa test set and 0.97 on the C. difficile test set. The F1-measures were the same for assembled sequences and raw sequencing data; however, building the model from assembled genomes is significantly faster. On these datasets, the model building on a mid-range Linux server takes approximately 3 to 5 hours per phenotype if assembled genomes are used and 10 hours per phenotype if raw sequencing data are used. The phenotype prediction from assembled genomes takes less than one second per isolate. Thus, PhenotypeSeeker should be well-suited for predicting phenotypes from large sequencing datasets. PhenotypeSeeker is implemented in Python programming language, is open-source software and is available at GitHub (). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gene co-expression network analysis is extremely useful in interpreting a complex biological process. The recent droplet-based single-cell technology is able to generate much larger gene expression data routinely with thousands of samples and tens of thousands of genes. To analyze such a large-scale gene-gene network, remarkable progress has been made in rigorous statistical inference of high-dimensional Gaussian graphical model (GGM). These approaches provide a formal confidence interval or a p-value rather than only a single point estimator for conditional dependence of a gene pair and are more desirable for identifying reliable gene networks. To promote their widespread use, we herein introduce an extensive and efficient R package named SILGGM (tatistical nference of arge-scale aussian raphical odel) that includes four main approaches in statistical inference of high-dimensional GGM. Unlike the existing tools, SILGGM provides statistically efficient inference on both individual gene pair and whole-scale gene pairs. It has a novel and consistent false discovery rate (FDR) procedure in all four methodologies. Based on the user-friendly design, it provides outputs compatible with multiple platforms for interactive network visualization. Furthermore, comparisons in simulation illustrate that SILGGM can accelerate the existing MATLAB implementation to several orders of magnitudes and further improve the speed of the already very efficient R package FastGGM. Testing results from the simulated data confirm the validity of all the approaches in SILGGM even in a very large-scale setting with the number of variables or genes to a ten thousand level. We have also applied our package to a novel single-cell RNA-seq data set with pan T cells. The results show that the approaches in SILGGM significantly outperform the conventional ones in a biological sense. The package is freely available via CRAN at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression by binding to partially complementary regions within the 3’UTR of their target genes. Computational methods play an important role in target prediction and assume that the miRNA “seed region” (nt 2 to 8) is required for functional targeting, but typically only identify ∼80% of known bindings. Recent studies have highlighted a role for the entire miRNA, suggesting that a more flexible methodology is needed. We present a novel approach for miRNA target prediction based on Deep Learning (DL) which, rather than incorporating any knowledge (such as seed regions), investigates the entire miRNA and 3’TR mRNA nucleotides to learn a uninhibited set of feature descriptors related to the targeting process. We collected more than 150,000 experimentally validated homo sapiens miRNA:gene targets and cross referenced them with different CLIP-Seq, CLASH and iPAR-CLIP datasets to obtain ∼20,000 validated miRNA:gene exact target sites. Using this data, we implemented and trained a deep neural network—composed of autoencoders and a feed-forward network—able to automatically learn features describing miRNA-mRNA interactions and assess functionality. Predictions were then refined using information such as site location or site accessibility energy. In a comparison using independent datasets, our DL approach consistently outperformed existing prediction methods, recognizing the seed region as a common feature in the targeting process, but also identifying the role of pairings outside this region. Thermodynamic analysis also suggests that site accessibility plays a role in targeting but that it cannot be used as a sole indicator for functionality. Data and source code available at: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biological experiments involving genomics or other high-throughput assays typically yield a data matrix that can be explored and analyzed using the R programming language with packages from the Bioconductor project. Improvements in the throughput of these assays have resulted in an explosion of data even from routine experiments, which poses a challenge to the existing computational infrastructure for statistical data analysis. For example, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) experiments frequently generate large matrices containing expression values for each gene in each cell, requiring sparse or file-backed representations for memory-efficient manipulation in R. These alternative representations are not easily compatible with high-performance C++ code used for computationally intensive tasks in existing R/Bioconductor packages. Here, we describe a C++ interface named beachmat, which enables agnostic data access from various matrix representations. This allows package developers to write efficient C++ code that is interoperable with dense, sparse and file-backed matrices, amongst others. We evaluated the performance of beachmat for accessing data from each matrix representation using both simulated and real scRNA-seq data, and defined a clear memory/speed trade-off to motivate the choice of an appropriate representation. We also demonstrate how beachmat can be incorporated into the code of other packages to drive analyses of a very large scRNA-seq data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are computing architectures with many interconnections of simple neural-inspired computing elements, and have been applied to biomedical fields such as imaging analysis and diagnosis. We have developed a new ANN framework called Cox-nnet to predict patient prognosis from high throughput transcriptomics data. In 10 TCGA RNA-Seq data sets, Cox-nnet achieves the same or better predictive accuracy compared to other methods, including Cox-proportional hazards regression (with LASSO, ridge, and mimimax concave penalty), Random Forests Survival and CoxBoost. Cox-nnet also reveals richer biological information, at both the pathway and gene levels. The outputs from the hidden layer node provide an alternative approach for survival-sensitive dimension reduction. In summary, we have developed a new method for accurate and efficient prognosis prediction on high throughput data, with functional biological insights. The source code is freely available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting novel microRNA (miRNA)-disease associations is clinically significant due to miRNAs’ potential roles of diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for various human diseases. Previous studies have demonstrated the viability of utilizing different types of biological data to computationally infer new disease-related miRNAs. Yet researchers face the challenge of how to effectively integrate diverse datasets and make reliable predictions. In this study, we presented a computational model named Laplacian Regularized Sparse Subspace Learning for MiRNA-Disease Association prediction (LRSSLMDA), which projected miRNAs/diseases’ statistical feature profile and graph theoretical feature profile to a common subspace. It used Laplacian regularization to preserve the local structures of the training data and a L1-norm constraint to select important miRNA/disease features for prediction. The strength of dimensionality reduction enabled the model to be easily extended to much higher dimensional datasets than those exploited in this study. Experimental results showed that LRSSLMDA outperformed ten previous models: the AUC of 0.9178 in global leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) and the AUC of 0.8418 in local LOOCV indicated the model’s superior prediction accuracy; and the average AUC of 0.9181+/-0.0004 in 5-fold cross validation justified its accuracy and stability. In addition, three types of case studies further demonstrated its predictive power. Potential miRNAs related to Colon Neoplasms, Lymphoma, Kidney Neoplasms, Esophageal Neoplasms and Breast Neoplasms were predicted by LRSSLMDA. Respectively, 98%, 88%, 96%, 98% and 98% out of the top 50 predictions were validated by experimental evidences. Therefore, we conclude that LRSSLMDA would be a valuable computational tool for miRNA-disease association prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel or rare variants in mitochondrial tRNA sequences may be observed after mitochondrial DNA analysis. Determining whether these variants are pathogenic is critical, but confirmation of the effect of a variant on mitochondrial function can be challenging. We have used available databases of benign and pathogenic variants, alignment between diverse tRNAs, structural information and comparative genomics to predict the impact of all possible single-base variants and deletions. The Mitochondrial tRNA Informatics Predictor (MitoTIP) is available through MITOMAP at . The source code for MitoTIP is available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally and numerically investigate the evolutionary dynamics of four competing strains of E. coli with differing expansion velocities in radially expanding colonies. We compare experimental measurements of the average fraction, correlation functions between strains, and the relative rates of genetic domain wall annihilations and coalescences to simulations modeling the population as a one-dimensional ring of annihilating and coalescing random walkers with deterministic biases due to selection. The simulations reveal that the evolutionary dynamics can be collapsed onto master curves governed by three essential parameters: (1) an expansion length beyond which selection dominates over genetic drift; (2) a characteristic angular correlation describing the size of genetic domains; and (3) a dimensionless constant quantifying the interplay between a colony’s curvature at the frontier and its selection length scale. We measure these parameters with a new technique that precisely measures small selective differences between spatially competing strains and show that our simulations accurately predict the dynamics without additional fitting. Our results suggest that the random walk model can act as a useful predictive tool for describing the evolutionary dynamics of range expansions composed of an arbitrary number of genotypes with different fitnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of high throughput technologies has led to a wealth of publicly available ‘omics data coming from different sources, such as transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics. Combining such large-scale biological data sets can lead to the discovery of important biological insights, provided that relevant information can be extracted in a holistic manner. Current statistical approaches have been focusing on identifying small subsets of molecules (a ‘molecular signature’) to explain or predict biological conditions, but mainly for a single type of ‘omics. In addition, commonly used methods are univariate and consider each biological feature independently. We introduce , an R package dedicated to the multivariate analysis of biological data sets with a specific focus on data exploration, dimension reduction and visualisation. By adopting a systems biology approach, the toolkit provides a wide range of methods that statistically integrate several data sets at once to probe relationships between heterogeneous ‘omics data sets. Our recent methods extend Projection to Latent Structure (PLS) models for discriminant analysis, for data integration across multiple ‘omics data or across independent studies, and for the identification of molecular signatures. We illustrate our latest integrative frameworks for the multivariate analyses of ‘omics data available from the package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the pleiotropic effects of genetic variants can increase statistical power, provide important information to achieve deep understanding of the complex genetic structures of disease, and offer powerful tools for designing effective treatments with fewer side effects. However, the current multiple phenotype association analysis paradigm lacks breadth (number of phenotypes and genetic variants jointly analyzed at the same time) and depth (hierarchical structure of phenotype and genotypes). A key issue for high dimensional pleiotropic analysis is to effectively extract informative internal representation and features from high dimensional genotype and phenotype data. To explore correlation information of genetic variants, effectively reduce data dimensions, and overcome critical barriers in advancing the development of novel statistical methods and computational algorithms for genetic pleiotropic analysis, we proposed a new statistic method referred to as a quadratically regularized functional CCA (QRFCCA) for association analysis which combines three approaches: (1) quadratically regularized matrix factorization, (2) functional data analysis and (3) canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Large-scale simulations show that the QRFCCA has a much higher power than that of the ten competing statistics while retaining the appropriate type 1 errors. To further evaluate performance, the QRFCCA and ten other statistics are applied to the whole genome sequencing dataset from the TwinsUK study. We identify a total of 79 genes with rare variants and 67 genes with common variants significantly associated with the 46 traits using QRFCCA. The results show that the QRFCCA substantially outperforms the ten other statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptation of the CRISPR-Cas9 system as a genome editing technique has generated much excitement in recent years owing to its ability to manipulate targeted genes and genomic regions that are complementary to a programmed single guide RNA (sgRNA). However, the efficacy of a specific sgRNA is not uniquely defined by exact sequence homology to the target site, thus unintended off-targets might additionally be cleaved. Current methods for sgRNA design are mainly concerned with predicting off-targets for a given sgRNA using basic sequence features and employ elementary rules for ranking possible sgRNAs. Here, we introduce CRISTA (CRISPR Target Assessment), a novel algorithm within the machine learning framework that determines the propensity of a genomic site to be cleaved by a given sgRNA. We show that the predictions made with CRISTA are more accurate than other available methodologies. We further demonstrate that the occurrence of bulges is not a rare phenomenon and should be accounted for in the prediction process. Beyond predicting cleavage efficiencies, the learning process provides inferences regarding patterns that underlie the mechanism of action of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. We discover that attributes that describe the spatial structure and rigidity of the entire genomic site as well as those surrounding the PAM region are a major component of the prediction capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network propagation is an important and widely used algorithm in systems biology, with applications in protein function prediction, disease gene prioritization, and patient stratification. However, up to this point it has required significant expertise to run. Here we extend the popular network analysis program Cytoscape to perform network propagation as an integrated function. Such integration greatly increases the access to network propagation by putting it in the hands of biologists and linking it to the many other types of network analysis and visualization available through Cytoscape. We demonstrate the power and utility of the algorithm by identifying mutations conferring resistance to Vemurafenib. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of the major transcript isoform relative to other isoforms from the same gene generated by alternative splicing (AS) is essential to the maintenance of normal cellular physiology. However, the underlying principles that determine such dominance remain unknown. Here, we analyzed the physical AS process and found that it can be modeled by a stochastic minimization process, which causes the scaled expression levels of all transcript isoforms to follow the same Weibull extreme value distribution. Surprisingly, we also found a simple equation to describe the median frequency of transcript isoforms of different dominance. This two-parameter Weibull model provides the statistical distribution of all isoforms of all transcribed genes, and reveals that previously unexplained observations concerning relative isoform expression derive from these principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential expression analysis is one of the most common types of analyses performed on various biological data (e.g. RNA-seq or mass spectrometry proteomics). It is the process that detects features, such as genes or proteins, showing statistically significant differences between the sample groups under comparison. A major challenge in the analysis is the choice of an appropriate test statistic, as different statistics have been shown to perform well in different datasets. To this end, the reproducibility-optimized test statistic (ROTS) adjusts a modified t-statistic according to the inherent properties of the data and provides a ranking of the features based on their statistical evidence for differential expression between two groups. ROTS has already been successfully applied in a range of different studies from transcriptomics to proteomics, showing competitive performance against other state-of-the-art methods. To promote its widespread use, we introduce here a Bioconductor R package for performing ROTS analysis conveniently on different types of omics data. To illustrate the benefits of ROTS in various applications, we present three case studies, involving proteomics and RNA-seq data from public repositories, including both bulk and single cell data. The package is freely available from Bioconductor (). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat—their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to habitat conditions that vary from person-to-person across the human population. Our mathematical framework shows that habitat fluctuations are sufficient for explaining intra-bodysite correlations in relative species abundances from the Human Microbiome Project. We explicitly show that the relative abundances of closely related species are positively correlated and can be predicted from taxonomic relationships. We identify a small set of functional pathways related to metabolism and maintenance of the cell wall that form the basis of a common resource sharing niche space of the human microbiota. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent few years, an increasing number of studies have shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) play critical roles in many fundamental and important biological processes. As one of pathogenetic factors, the molecular mechanisms underlying human complex diseases still have not been completely understood from the perspective of miRNA. Predicting potential miRNA-disease associations makes important contributions to understanding the pathogenesis of diseases, developing new drugs, and formulating individualized diagnosis and treatment for diverse human complex diseases. Instead of only depending on expensive and time-consuming biological experiments, computational prediction models are effective by predicting potential miRNA-disease associations, prioritizing candidate miRNAs for the investigated diseases, and selecting those miRNAs with higher association probabilities for further experimental validation. In this study, ath-ased iRNA-isease ssociation (PBMDA) prediction model was proposed by integrating known human miRNA-disease associations, miRNA functional similarity, disease semantic similarity, and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity for miRNAs and diseases. This model constructed a heterogeneous graph consisting of three interlinked sub-graphs and further adopted depth-first search algorithm to infer potential miRNA-disease associations. As a result, PBMDA achieved reliable performance in the frameworks of both local and global LOOCV (AUCs of 0.8341 and 0.9169, respectively) and 5-fold cross validation (average AUC of 0.9172). In the cases studies of three important human diseases, 88% (Esophageal Neoplasms), 88% (Kidney Neoplasms) and 90% (Colon Neoplasms) of top-50 predicted miRNAs have been manually confirmed by previous experimental reports from literatures. Through the comparison performance between PBMDA and other previous models in case studies, the reliable performance also demonstrates that PBMDA could serve as a powerful computational tool to accelerate the identification of disease-miRNA associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gut microbiome is a dynamic system that changes with host development, health, behavior, diet, and microbe-microbe interactions. Prior work on gut microbial time series has largely focused on autoregressive models (e.g. Lotka-Volterra). However, we show that most of the variance in microbial time series is non-autoregressive. In addition, we show how community state-clustering is flawed when it comes to characterizing within-host dynamics and that more continuous methods are required. Most organisms exhibited stable, mean-reverting behavior suggestive of fixed carrying capacities and abundant taxa were largely shared across individuals. This mean-reverting behavior allowed us to apply sparse vector autoregression (sVAR)—a multivariate method developed for econometrics—to model the autoregressive component of gut community dynamics. We find a strong phylogenetic signal in the non-autoregressive co-variance from our sVAR model residuals, which suggests niche filtering. We show how changes in diet are also non-autoregressive and that Operational Taxonomic Units strongly correlated with dietary variables have much less of an autoregressive component to their variance, which suggests that diet is a major driver of microbial dynamics. Autoregressive variance appears to be driven by multi-day recovery from frequent facultative anaerobe blooms, which may be driven by fluctuations in luminal redox. Overall, we identify two dynamic regimes within the human gut microbiota: one likely driven by external environmental fluctuations, and the other by internal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenotypic diversity is considered beneficial to the evolution of contingent cooperation, in which cooperators channel their help preferentially towards others of similar phenotypes. However, it remains largely unclear how phenotypic variation arises in the first place and thus leads to the construction of phenotypic complexity. Here we propose a mathematical model to study the coevolutionary dynamics of phenotypic diversity and contingent cooperation. Unlike previous models, our model does not assume any prescribed level of phenotypic diversity, but rather lets it be an evolvable trait. Each individual expresses one phenotype at a time and only the phenotypes expressed are visible to others. Moreover, individuals can differ in their potential of phenotypic variation, which is characterized by the number of distinct phenotypes they can randomly switch to. Each individual incurs a cost proportional to the number of potentially expressible phenotypes so as to retain phenotypic variation and expression. Our results show that phenotypic diversity coevolves with contingent cooperation under a wide range of conditions and that there exists an optimal level of phenotypic diversity best promoting contingent cooperation. It pays for contingent cooperators to elevate their potential of phenotypic variation, thereby increasing their opportunities of establishing cooperation via novel phenotypes, as these new phenotypes serve as secret tags that are difficult for defector to discover and chase after. We also find that evolved high levels of phenotypic diversity can occasionally collapse due to the invasion of defector mutants, suggesting that cooperation and phenotypic diversity can mutually reinforce each other. Thus, our results provide new insights into better understanding the coevolution of cooperation and phenotypic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand genome regulation, it is important to uncover the role of transcription factors in the process of chromatin structure establishment and maintenance. Here we present a data-driven approach to systematically characterise transcription factors that are relevant for this process. Our method uses a linear mixed modelling approach to combine datasets of transcription factor binding motif enrichments in open chromatin and gene expression across the same set of cell lines. Applying this approach to the ENCODE dataset, we confirm already known and imply numerous novel transcription factors that play a role in the establishment or maintenance of open chromatin. In particular, our approach rediscovers many factors that have been annotated as pioneer factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gene expression regulators, such as transcription factors (TFs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), have varying regulatory targets based on the tissue and physiological state (context) within which they are expressed. While the emergence of regulator-characterizing experiments has inferred the target genes of many regulators across many contexts, methods for transferring regulator target genes across contexts are lacking. Further, regulator target gene lists frequently are not curated or have permissive inclusion criteria, impairing their use. Here, we present a method called iterative Contextual Transcriptional Activity Inference of Regulators (icTAIR) to resolve these issues. icTAIR takes a regulator’s previously-identified target gene list and combines it with gene expression data from a context, quantifying that regulator’s activity for that context. It then calculates the correlation between each listed target gene’s expression and the quantitative score of regulatory activity, removes the uncorrelated genes from the list, and iterates the process until it derives a stable list of refined target genes. To validate and demonstrate icTAIR’s power, we use it to refine the MSigDB c3 database of TF, miRNA and unclassified motif target gene lists for breast cancer. We then use its output for survival analysis with clinicopathological multivariable adjustment in 7 independent breast cancer datasets covering 3,430 patients. We uncover many novel prognostic regulators that were obscured prior to refinement, in particular NFY, and offer a detailed look at the composition and relationships among the breast cancer prognostic regulome. We anticipate icTAIR will be of general use in contextually refining regulator target genes for discoveries across many contexts. The icTAIR algorithm can be downloaded from . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chromosome conformation capture (3C) techniques have revealed many fascinating insights into the spatial organization of genomes. 3C methods typically provide information about chromosomal contacts in a large population of cells, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the three-dimensional organization of genomes in individual cells. Recently it became possible to study single cells with Hi-C, a genome-wide 3C variant, demonstrating a high cell-to-cell variability of genome organization. In principle, restraint-based modeling should allow us to infer the 3D structure of chromosomes from single-cell contact data, but suffers from the sparsity and low resolution of chromosomal contacts. To address these challenges, we adapt the Bayesian Inferential Structure Determination (ISD) framework, originally developed for NMR structure determination of proteins, to infer statistical ensembles of chromosome structures from single-cell data. Using ISD, we are able to compute structural error bars and estimate model parameters, thereby eliminating potential bias imposed by ad hoc parameter choices. We apply and compare different models for representing the chromatin fiber and for incorporating singe-cell contact information. Finally, we extend our approach to the analysis of diploid chromosome data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]