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MIRit is an R package that provides several methods for investigating the relationships between miRNAs and genes in different biological conditions. In particular, MIRit allows to explore the functions of dysregulated miRNAs, and makes it possible to identify miRNA-gene regulatory axes that control biological pathways, thus enabling the users to unveil the complexity of miRNA biology. MIRit is an all-in-one framework that aims to help researchers in all the central aspects of an integrative miRNA-mRNA analyses, from differential expression analysis to network characterization.

Pathview is a tool set for pathway based data integration and visualization. It maps and renders a wide variety of biological data on relevant pathway graphs. All users need is to supply their data and specify the target pathway. Pathview automatically downloads the pathway graph data, parses the data file, maps user data to the pathway, and render pathway graph with the mapped data. In addition, Pathview also seamlessly integrates with pathway and gene set (enrichment) analysis tools for large-scale and fully automated analysis.

This package allows users to estimate the science-wise false discovery rate from Jager and Leek, "Empirical estimates suggest most published medical research is true," 2013, Biostatistics, using an EM approach due to the presence of rounding and censoring. It also allows users to estimate the false discovery rate conditional on covariates, using a regression framework, as per Boca and Leek, "A direct approach to estimating false discovery rates conditional on covariates," 2018, PeerJ.

Motivation: The understanding of cancer mechanism requires the identification of genes playing a role in the development of the pathology and the characterization of their role (notably oncogenes and tumor suppressors). Results: We present an R/bioconductor package called MoonlightR which returns a list of candidate driver genes for specific cancer types on the basis of TCGA expression data. The method first infers gene regulatory networks and then carries out a functional enrichment analysis (FEA) (implementing an upstream regulator analysis, URA) to score the importance of well-known biological processes with respect to the studied cancer type. Eventually, by means of random forests, MoonlightR predicts two specific roles for the candidate driver genes: i) tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) and ii) oncogenes (OCGs). As a consequence, this methodology does not only identify genes playing a dual role (e.g. TSG in one cancer type and OCG in another) but also helps in elucidating the biological processes underlying their specific roles. In particular, MoonlightR can be used to discover OCGs and TSGs in the same cancer type. This may help in answering the question whether some genes change role between early stages (I, II) and late stages (III, IV) in breast cancer. In the future, this analysis could be useful to determine the causes of different resistances to chemotherapeutic treatments.

A differential abundance analysis for the comparison of two or more conditions. Useful for analyzing data from standard RNA-seq or meta-RNA-seq assays as well as selected and unselected values from in-vitro sequence selections. Uses a Dirichlet-multinomial model to infer abundance from counts, optimized for three or more experimental replicates. The method infers biological and sampling variation to calculate the expected false discovery rate, given the variation, based on a Wilcoxon Rank Sum test and Welch's t-test (via aldex.ttest), a Kruskal-Wallis test (via aldex.kw), a generalized linear model (via aldex.glm), or a correlation test (via aldex.corr). All tests report predicted p-values and posterior Benjamini-Hochberg corrected p-values. ALDEx2 also calculates expected standardized effect sizes for paired or unpaired study designs. ALDEx2 can now be used to estimate the effect of scale on the results and report on the scale-dependent robustness of results.