Statistical Tests for Detecting Differential RNA-Transcript Expression from Read Counts

As a fruit of the current revolution in sequencing technology, transcriptomes can now be analyzed at an unprecedented level of detail. These advances have been exploited for detecting differential expressed genes across biological samples and for quantifying the abundances of various RNA transcripts within one gene. However, explicit strategies for detecting the hidden differential abundances of RNA transcripts in biological samples have not been defined. In this work, we present two novel statistical tests to address this issue: a 'gene structure sensitive' Poisson test for detecting differential expression when the transcript structure of the gene is known, and a kernel-based test called Maximum Mean Discrepancy when it is unknown. We analyzed the proposed approaches on simulated read data for two artificial samples as well as on factual reads generated by the Illumina Genome Analyzer for two _C. elegans_ samples. Our analysis shows that the Poisson test identifies genes with differential transcript expression considerably better that previously proposed RNA transcript quantification approaches for this task. The MMD test is able to detect a large fraction (75%) of such differential cases without the knowledge of the annotated transcripts. It is therefore well-suited to analyze RNA-Seq experiments when the genome annotations are incomplete or not available, where other approaches have to fail

Models for transcript quantification from RNA-Seq

RNA-Seq is rapidly becoming the standard technology for transcriptome analysis. Fundamental to many of the applications of RNA-Seq is the quantification problem, which is the accurate measurement of relative transcript abundances from the sequenced reads. We focus on this problem, and review many recently published models that are used to estimate the relative abundances. In addition to describing the models and the different approaches to inference, we also explain how methods are related to each other. A key result is that we show how inference with many of the models results in identical estimates of relative abundances, even though model formulations can be very different. In fact, we are able to show how a single general model captures many of the elements of previously published methods. We also review the applications of RNA-Seq models to differential analysis, and explain why accurate relative transcript abundance estimates are crucial for downstream analyses

A comparative study of RNA-seq analysis strategies.

Three principal approaches have been proposed for inferring the set of transcripts expressed in RNA samples using RNA-seq. The simplest approach uses curated annotations, which assumes the transcripts in a sample are a subset of the transcripts listed in a curated database. A more ambitious method involves aligning reads to a reference genome and using the alignments to infer the transcript structures, possibly with the aid of a curated transcript database. The most challenging approach is to assemble reads into putative transcripts de novo without the aid of reference data. We have systematically assessed the properties of these three approaches through a simulation study. We have found that the sensitivity of computational transcript set estimation is severely limited. Computational approaches (both genome-guided and de novo assembly) produce a large number of artefacts, which are assigned large expression estimates and absorb a substantial proportion of the signal when performing expression analysis. The approach using curated annotations shows good expression correlation even when the annotations are incomplete. Furthermore, any incorrect transcripts present in a curated set do not absorb much signal, so it is preferable to have a curation set with high sensitivity than high precision. Software to simulate transcript sets, expression values and sequence reads under a wider range of parameter values and to compare sensitivity, precision and signal-to-noise ratios of different methods is freely available online (https://github.com/boboppie/RSSS) and can be expanded by interested parties to include methods other than the exemplars presented in this article.This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (WT097679); the Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre; Cancer Research UK (C14303/A10825) and the Medical Research Council (G1002319).This is the final version of the article. It was first available from Oxford University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbv00

Bacillus anthracis genome organization in light of whole transcriptome sequencing

Emerging knowledge of whole prokaryotic transcriptomes could validate a number of theoretical concepts introduced in the early days of genomics. What are the rules connecting gene expression levels with sequence determinants such as quantitative scores of promoters and terminators? Are translation efficiency measures, e.g. codon adaptation index and RBS score related to gene expression? We used the whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing of a bacterial pathogen Bacillus anthracis to assess correlation of gene expression level with promoter, terminator and RBS scores, codon adaptation index, as well as with a new measure of gene translational efficiency, average translation speed. We compared computational predictions of operon topologies with the transcript borders inferred from RNA-Seq reads. Transcriptome mapping may also improve existing gene annotation. Upon assessment of accuracy of current annotation of protein-coding genes in the B. anthracis genome we have shown that the transcriptome data indicate existence of more than a hundred genes missing in the annotation though predicted by an ab initio gene finder. Interestingly, we observed that many pseudogenes possess not only a sequence with detectable coding potential but also promoters that maintain transcriptional activity

Identifying differentially expressed transcripts from RNA-seq data with biological variation

Motivation: High-throughput sequencing enables expression analysis at the level of individual transcripts. The analysis of transcriptome expression levels and differential expression (DE) estimation requires a probabilistic approach to properly account for ambiguity caused by shared exons and finite read sampling as well as the intrinsic biological variance of transcript expression. Results: We present Bayesian inference of transcripts from sequencing data (BitSeq), a Bayesian approach for estimation of transcript expression level from RNA-seq experiments. Inferred relative expression is represented by Markov chain Monte Carlo samples from the posterior probability distribution of a generative model of the read data. We propose a novel method for DE analysis across replicates which propagates uncertainty from the sample-level model while modelling biological variance using an expression-level-dependent prior. We demonstrate the advantages of our method using simulated data as well as an RNA-seq dataset with technical and biological replication for both studied conditions. Availability: The implementation of the transcriptome expression estimation and differential expression analysis, BitSeq, has been written in C++ and Python. The software is available online from http://code.google.com/p/bitseq/, version 0.4 was used for generating results presented in this article.Peer reviewe

Optimization Techniques For Next-Generation Sequencing Data Analysis

High-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a popular cost-efficient technology with many medical and biological applications. This technology, however, presents a number of computational challenges in reconstructing full-length transcripts and accurately estimate their abundances across all cell types. Our contributions include (1) transcript and gene expression level estimation methods, (2) methods for genome-guided and annotation-guided transcriptome reconstruction, and (3) de novo assembly and annotation of real data sets. Transcript expression level estimation, also referred to as transcriptome quantification, tackle the problem of estimating the expression level of each transcript. Transcriptome quantification analysis is crucial to determine similar transcripts or unraveling gene functions and transcription regulation mechanisms. We propose a novel simulated regression based method for transcriptome frequency estimation from RNA-Seq reads. Transcriptome reconstruction refers to the problem of reconstructing the transcript sequences from the RNA-Seq data. We present genome-guided and annotation-guided transcriptome reconstruction methods. Empirical results on both synthetic and real RNA-seq datasets show that the proposed methods improve transcriptome quantification and reconstruction accuracy compared to currently state of the art methods. We further present the assembly and annotation of Bugula neritina transcriptome (a marine colonial animal), and Tallapoosa darter genome (a species-rich radiation freshwater fish)

An approach to improved microbial eukaryotic genome annotation

Les nouvelles technologies de séquençage d’ADN ont accélérées la vitesse à laquelle les données génomiques sont générées. Par contre, une fois séquencées et assemblées, un défi continu est l'annotation structurelle précise de ces nouvelles séquences génomiques. Par le séquençage et l'assemblage du transcriptome (RNA-Seq) du même organisme, la précision de l'annotation génomique peut être améliorée, car les lectures de RNA-Seq et les transcrits assemblés fournissent des informations précises sur la structure des gènes. Plusieurs pipelines bio-informatiques actuelles incorporent des informations provenant du RNA-Seq ainsi que des données de similarité des séquences protéiques, pour automatiser l'annotation structurelle d’un génome de manière que la qualité se rapproche à celle de l'annotation par des experts. Les pipelines suivent généralement un flux de travail similaire. D'abord, les régions répétitives sont identifiées afin d'éviter de fausser les alignements de séquences et les prédictions de gènes. Deuxièmement, une base de données est construite contenant les données expérimentales telles que l’alignement des lectures de séquences, des transcrits et des protéines, ce qui informe les prédictions de gènes basées sur les Modèles de Markov Cachés généralisés. La dernière étape est de consolider les alignements de séquences et les prédictions de gènes dans un consensus de haute qualité. Or, les pipelines existants sont complexes et donc susceptibles aux biais et aux erreurs, ce qui peut empoisonner les prédictions de gènes et la construction de modèles consensus. Nous avons développé une approche améliorée pour l'annotation des génomes eucaryotes microbiens. Notre approche comprend deux aspects principaux. Le premier est axé sur la création d'un ensemble d'évidences extrinsèques le plus complet et diversifié afin de mieux informer les prédictions de gènes. Le deuxième porte sur la construction du consensus du modèle de gènes en utilisant les évidences extrinsèques et les prédictions par MMC, tel que l'influence de leurs biais potentiel soit réduite. La comparaison de notre nouvel outil avec trois pipelines populaires démontre des gains significatifs de sensibilité et de spécificité des modèles de gènes, de transcrits, d'exons et d'introns dans l’annotation structural de génomes d’eucaryotes microbiens.New sequencing technologies have considerably accelerated the rate at which genomic data is being generated. One ongoing challenge is the accurate structural annotation of those novel genomes once sequenced and assembled, in particular if the organism does not have close relatives with well-annotated genomes. Whole-transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) and assembly—both of which share similarities to whole-genome sequencing and assembly, respectively—have been shown to dramatically increase the accuracy of gene annotation. Read coverage, inferred splice junctions and assembled transcripts can provide valuable information about gene structure. Several annotation pipelines have been developed to automate structural annotation by incorporating information from RNA-Seq, as well as protein sequence similarity data, with the goal of reaching the accuracy of an expert curator. Annotation pipelines follow a similar workflow. The first step is to identify repetitive regions to prevent misinformed sequence alignments and gene predictions. The next step is to construct a database of evidence from experimental data such as RNA-Seq mapping and assembly, and protein sequence alignments, which are used to inform the generalised Hidden Markov Models of gene prediction software. The final step is to consolidate sequence alignments and gene predictions into a high-confidence consensus set. Thus, automated pipelines are complex, and therefore susceptible to incomplete and erroneous use of information, which can poison gene predictions and consensus model building. Here, we present an improved approach to microbial eukaryotic genome annotation. Its conception was based on identifying and mitigating potential sources of error and bias that are present in available pipelines. Our approach has two main aspects. The first is to create a more complete and diverse set of extrinsic evidence to better inform gene predictions. The second is to use extrinsic evidence in tandem with predictions such that the influence of their respective biases in the consensus gene models is reduced. We benchmarked our new tool against three known pipelines, showing significant gains in gene, transcript, exon and intron sensitivity and specificity in the genome annotation of microbial eukaryotes