RTNduals

A transcriptional regulatory network (TRN) consists of a collection of transcription factors (TFs) and the regulated target genes. TFs are regulators that recognize specific DNA sequences and guide the expression of the genome, either activating or repressing the expression the target genes. The set of genes controlled by the same TF forms a regulon. This package provides classes and methods for the reconstruction of TRNs and analysis of regulons.

RTNsurvival integrates regulons inferred by the RTN package with survival data. For each regulon, a two-tailed GSEA framework computes a differential Enrichment Score (dES) at the individual-sample level. The resulting dES distribution across samples is then used to evaluate survival associations within the cohort. Two primary workflows are supported: (i) Cox proportional hazards models, in which regulon activities are treated as predictors of survival time, and (ii) Kaplan–Meier analyses assessing cohort stratification based on regulon activity. All graphical outputs are customizable according to user specifications.

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.

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.

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.

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.