epiregulon.extra

Integrating an increasing number of available multi-omics cancer data remains one of the main challenges to improve our understanding of cancer. One of the main challenges is using multi-omics data for identifying novel cancer driver genes. We have developed an algorithm, called AMARETTO, that integrates copy number, DNA methylation and gene expression data to identify a set of driver genes by analyzing cancer samples and connects them to clusters of co-expressed genes, which we define as modules. We applied AMARETTO in a pancancer setting to identify cancer driver genes and their modules on multiple cancer sites. AMARETTO captures modules enriched in angiogenesis, cell cycle and EMT, and modules that accurately predict survival and molecular subtypes. This allows AMARETTO to identify novel cancer driver genes directing canonical cancer pathways.

netZooR unifies the implementations of several Network Zoo methods (netzoo, netzoo.github.io) into a single package by creating interfaces between network inference and network analysis methods. Currently, the package has 3 methods for network inference including PANDA and its optimized implementation OTTER (network reconstruction using mutliple lines of biological evidence), LIONESS (single-sample network inference), and EGRET (genotype-specific networks). Network analysis methods include CONDOR (community detection), ALPACA (differential community detection), CRANE (significance estimation of differential modules), MONSTER (estimation of network transition states). In addition, YARN allows to process gene expresssion data for tissue-specific analyses and SAMBAR infers missing mutation data based on pathway information.

Gene regulatory networks model the underlying gene regulation hierarchies that drive gene expression and observed phenotypes. Epiregulon infers TF activity in single cells by constructing a gene regulatory network (regulons). This is achieved through integration of scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq data and incorporation of public bulk TF ChIP-seq data. Links between regulatory elements and their target genes are established by computing correlations between chromatin accessibility and gene expressions.

epidecodeR is a package capable of analysing impact of degree of DNA/RNA epigenetic chemical modifications on dysregulation of genes or proteins. This package integrates chemical modification data generated from a host of epigenomic or epitranscriptomic techniques such as ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, m6A-seq, etc. and dysregulated gene lists in the form of differential gene expression, ribosome occupancy or differential protein translation and identify impact of dysregulation of genes caused due to varying degrees of chemical modifications associated with the genes. epidecodeR generates cumulative distribution function (CDF) plots showing shifts in trend of overall log2FC between genes divided into groups based on the degree of modification associated with the genes. The tool also tests for significance of difference in log2FC between groups of genes.

Reconstructing gene regulatory networks and transcription factor activity is crucial to understand biological processes and holds potential for developing personalized treatment. Yet, it is still an open problem as state-of-art algorithm are often not able to handle large amounts of data. Furthermore, many of the present methods predict numerous false positives and are unable to integrate other sources of information such as previously known interactions. Here we introduce KBoost, an algorithm that uses kernel PCA regression, boosting and Bayesian model averaging for fast and accurate reconstruction of gene regulatory networks. KBoost can also use a prior network built on previously known transcription factor targets. We have benchmarked KBoost using three different datasets against other high performing algorithms. The results show that our method compares favourably to other methods across datasets.

R package for transcriptional analysis based on transcriptograms, a method to analyze transcriptomes that projects expression values on a set of ordered proteins, arranged such that the probability that gene products participate in the same metabolic pathway exponentially decreases with the increase of the distance between two proteins of the ordering. Transcriptograms are, hence, genome wide gene expression profiles that provide a global view for the cellular metabolism, while indicating gene sets whose expressions are altered.