Network-based Isoform Quantification with RNA-Seq Data for Cancer Transcriptome Analysis

High-throughput mRNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is widely used for transcript quantification of gene isoforms. Since RNA-Seq data alone is often not sufficient to accurately identify the read origins from the isoforms for quantification, we propose to explore protein domain-domain interactions as prior knowledge for integrative analysis with RNA-Seq data. We introduce a Network-based method for RNA-Seq-based Transcript Quantification (Net-RSTQ) to integrate protein domain-domain interaction network with short read alignments for transcript abundance estimation. Based on our observation that the abundances of the neighboring isoforms by domain-domain interactions in the network are positively correlated, Net-RSTQ models the expression of the neighboring transcripts as Dirichlet priors on the likelihood of the observed read alignments against the transcripts in one gene. The transcript abundances of all the genes are then jointly estimated with alternating optimization of multiple EM problems. In simulation Net-RSTQ effectively improved isoform transcript quantifications when isoform co-expressions correlate with their interactions. qRT-PCR results on 25 multi-isoform genes in a stem cell line, an ovarian cancer cell line, and a breast cancer cell line also showed that Net-RSTQ estimated more consistent isoform proportions with RNA-Seq data. In the experiments on the RNA-Seq data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the transcript abundances estimated by Net-RSTQ are more informative for patient sample classification of ovarian cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer. All experimental results collectively support that Net-RSTQ is a promising approach for isoform quantification. Net-RSTQ toolbox is available at http://compbio.cs.umn.edu/Net-RSTQ/.
Author Summary New sequencing technologies for transcriptome-wide profiling of RNAs have greatly promoted the interest in isoform-based functional characterizations of a cellular system. Elucidation of gene expressions at the isoform resolution could lead to new molecular mechanisms such as gene-regulations and alternative splicings, and potentially better molecular signals for phenotype predictions. However, it could be overly optimistic to derive the proportion of the isoforms of a gene solely based on short read alignments. Inherently, systematical sampling biases from RNA library preparation and ambiguity of read origins in overlapping isoforms pose a problem in reliability. The work in this paper exams the possibility of using protein domain-domain interactions as prior knowledge in isoform transcript quantification. We first made the observation that protein domain-domain interactions positively correlate with isoform co-expressions in TCGA data and then designed a probabilistic EM approach to integrate domain-domain interactions with short read alignments for estimation of isoform proportions. Validated by qRT-PCR experiments on three cell lines, simulations and classifications of TCGA patient samples in several cancer types, Net-RSTQ is proven a useful tool for isoform-based analysis in functional genomes and systems biology.