MIRit

Takes as input an incomplete perturbation profile and differential gene expression in log odds and infers unobserved perturbations and augments observed ones. The inference is done by iteratively inferring a network from the perturbations and inferring perturbations from the network. The network inference is done by Nested Effects Models.

This package implements the Ensemble of Gene Set Enrichment Analyses (EGSEA) method for gene set testing. EGSEA algorithm utilizes the analysis results of twelve prominent GSE algorithms in the literature to calculate collective significance scores for each gene set.

BioNERO aims to integrate all aspects of biological network inference in a single package, including data preprocessing, exploratory analyses, network inference, and analyses for biological interpretations. BioNERO can be used to infer gene coexpression networks (GCNs) and gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data. Additionally, it can be used to explore topological properties of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. GCN inference relies on the popular WGCNA algorithm. GRN inference is based on the "wisdom of the crowds" principle, which consists in inferring GRNs with multiple algorithms (here, CLR, GENIE3 and ARACNE) and calculating the average rank for each interaction pair. As all steps of network analyses are included in this package, BioNERO makes users avoid having to learn the syntaxes of several packages and how to communicate between them. Finally, users can also identify consensus modules across independent expression sets and calculate intra and interspecies module preservation statistics between different networks.

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.

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.

This package implements a variety of functions useful for gene set analysis using rotations to approximate the null distribution. It contributes with the implementation of seven test statistic scores that can be used with different goals and interpretations. Several functions are available to complement the statistical results with graphical representations.