methodical

TENET identifies key transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements (REs) linked to a specific cell type by finding significantly correlated differences in gene expression and RE DNA methylation between case and control input datasets, and identifying the top genes by number of significant RE DNA methylation site links. It also includes many tools for visualization and analysis of the results, including plots displaying and comparing methylation and expression data and methylation site link counts, survival analysis, TF motif searching in the vicinity of linked RE DNA methylation sites, custom TAD and peak overlap analysis, and UCSC Genome Browser track file generation. A utility function is also provided to download methylation, expression, and patient survival data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for use in TENET or other analyses.

The aim of TCGAbiolinks is : i) facilitate the GDC open-access data retrieval, ii) prepare the data using the appropriate pre-processing strategies, iii) provide the means to carry out different standard analyses and iv) to easily reproduce earlier research results. In more detail, the package provides multiple methods for analysis (e.g., differential expression analysis, identifying differentially methylated regions) and methods for visualization (e.g., survival plots, volcano plots, starburst plots) in order to easily develop complete analysis pipelines.

Gene Expression Omnibus(GEO) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) provide us with a wealth of data, such as RNA-seq, DNA Methylation, SNP and Copy number variation data. It's easy to download data from TCGA using the gdc tool, but processing these data into a format suitable for bioinformatics analysis requires more work. This R package was developed to handle these data.

This package allows to estimate missing values in DNA methylation data. methyLImp method is based on linear regression since methylation levels show a high degree of inter-sample correlation. Implementation is parallelised over chromosomes since probes on different chromosomes are usually independent. Mini-batch approach to reduce the runtime in case of large number of samples is available.

KnowYourCG (KYCG) is a supervised learning framework designed for the functional analysis of DNA methylation data. Unlike existing tools that focus on genes or genomic intervals, KnowYourCG directly targets CpG dinucleotides, featuring automated supervised screenings of diverse biological and technical influences, including sequence motifs, transcription factor binding, histone modifications, replication timing, cell-type-specific methylation, and trait-epigenome associations. KnowYourCG addresses the challenges of data sparsity in various methylation datasets, including low-pass Nanopore sequencing, single-cell DNA methylomes, 5-hydroxymethylation profiles, spatial DNA methylation maps, and array-based datasets for epigenome-wide association studies and epigenetic clocks (<doi:10.1126/sciadv.adw3027>).

coMethDMR identifies genomic regions associated with continuous phenotypes by optimally leverages covariations among CpGs within predefined genomic regions. Instead of testing all CpGs within a genomic region, coMethDMR carries out an additional step that selects co-methylated sub-regions first without using any outcome information. Next, coMethDMR tests association between methylation within the sub-region and continuous phenotype using a random coefficient mixed effects model, which models both variations between CpG sites within the region and differential methylation simultaneously.