STRINGdb

CCPlotR is an R package for visualising results from tools that predict cell-cell interactions from single-cell RNA-seq data. These plots are generic and can be used to visualise results from multiple tools such as Liana, CellPhoneDB, NATMI etc.

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.

This package implements methods and an evaluation framework to infer differential co-expression/association networks. Various methods are implemented and can be evaluated using simulated datasets. Inference of differential co-expression networks can allow identification of networks that are altered between two conditions (e.g., health and disease).

SCUDO (Signature-based Clustering for Diagnostic Purposes) is a rank-based method for the analysis of gene expression profiles for diagnostic and classification purposes. It is based on the identification of sample-specific gene signatures composed of the most up- and down-regulated genes for that sample. Starting from gene expression data, functions in this package identify sample-specific gene signatures and use them to build a graph of samples. In this graph samples are joined by edges if they have a similar expression profile, according to a pre-computed similarity matrix. The similarity between the expression profiles of two samples is computed using a method similar to GSEA. The graph of samples can then be used to perform community clustering or to perform supervised classification of samples in a testing set.

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.

A simple, fast Bayesian method for computing posterior probabilities for relationships between a single predictor variable and multiple potential outcome variables, incorporating prior probabilities of relationships. In the context of knockdown experiments, the predictor variable is the knocked-down gene, while the other genes are potential targets. Can also be used for differential expression/2-class data.