Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Modules in Cancer Cell Cycle by Multi-Source Data Integration

Precise regulation of the cell cycle is crucial to the growth and development of all organisms. Understanding the regulatory mechanism of the cell cycle is crucial to unraveling many complicated diseases, most notably cancer. Multiple sources of biological data are available to study the dynamic interactions among many genes that are related to the cancer cell cycle. Integrating these informative and complementary data sources can help to infer a mutually consistent gene transcriptional regulatory network with strong similarity to the underlying gene regulatory relationships in cancer cells.We propose an integrative framework that infers gene regulatory modules from the cell cycle of cancer cells by incorporating multiple sources of biological data, including gene expression profiles, gene ontology, and molecular interaction. Among 846 human genes with putative roles in cell cycle regulation, we identified 46 transcription factors and 39 gene ontology groups. We reconstructed regulatory modules to infer the underlying regulatory relationships. Four regulatory network motifs were identified from the interaction network. The relationship between each transcription factor and predicted target gene groups was examined by training a recurrent neural network whose topology mimics the network motif(s) to which the transcription factor was assigned. Inferred network motifs related to eight well-known cell cycle genes were confirmed by gene set enrichment analysis, binding site enrichment analysis, and comparison with previously published experimental results.We established a robust method that can accurately infer underlying relationships between a given transcription factor and its downstream target genes by integrating different layers of biological data. Our method could also be beneficial to biologists for predicting the components of regulatory modules in which any candidate gene is involved. Such predictions can then be used to design a more streamlined experimental approach for biological validation. Understanding the dynamics of these modules will shed light on the processes that occur in cancer cells resulting from errors in cell cycle regulation

MorphDB : prioritizing genes for specialized metabolism pathways and gene ontology categories in plants

Recent times have seen an enormous growth of "omics" data, of which high-throughput gene expression data are arguably the most important from a functional perspective. Despite huge improvements in computational techniques for the functional classification of gene sequences, common similarity-based methods often fall short of providing full and reliable functional information. Recently, the combination of comparative genomics with approaches in functional genomics has received considerable interest for gene function analysis, leveraging both gene expression based guilt-by-association methods and annotation efforts in closely related model organisms. Besides the identification of missing genes in pathways, these methods also typically enable the discovery of biological regulators (i.e., transcription factors or signaling genes). A previously built guilt-by-association method is MORPH, which was proven to be an efficient algorithm that performs particularly well in identifying and prioritizing missing genes in plant metabolic pathways. Here, we present MorphDB, a resource where MORPH-based candidate genes for large-scale functional annotations (Gene Ontology, MapMan bins) are integrated across multiple plant species. Besides a gene centric query utility, we present a comparative network approach that enables researchers to efficiently browse MORPH predictions across functional gene sets and species, facilitating efficient gene discovery and candidate gene prioritization. MorphDB is available at http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/webtools/morphdb/morphDB/index/. We also provide a toolkit, named "MORPH bulk" (https://github.com/arzwa/morph-bulk), for running MORPH in bulk mode on novel data sets, enabling researchers to apply MORPH to their own species of interest

A systems biology model of the regulatory network in Populus leaves reveals interacting regulators and conserved regulation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Green plant leaves have always fascinated biologists as hosts for photosynthesis and providers of basic energy to many food webs. Today, comprehensive databases of gene expression data enable us to apply increasingly more advanced computational methods for reverse-engineering the regulatory network of leaves, and to begin to understand the gene interactions underlying complex emergent properties related to stress-response and development. These new systems biology methods are now also being applied to organisms such as <it>Populus</it>, a woody perennial tree, in order to understand the specific characteristics of these species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a systems biology model of the regulatory network of <it>Populus </it>leaves. The network is reverse-engineered from promoter information and expression profiles of leaf-specific genes measured over a large set of conditions related to stress and developmental. The network model incorporates interactions between regulators, such as synergistic and competitive relationships, by evaluating increasingly more complex regulatory mechanisms, and is therefore able to identify new regulators of leaf development not found by traditional genomics methods based on pair-wise expression similarity. The approach is shown to explain available gene function information and to provide robust prediction of expression levels in new data. We also use the predictive capability of the model to identify condition-specific regulation as well as conserved regulation between <it>Populus </it>and <it>Arabidopsis</it>.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We outline a computationally inferred model of the regulatory network of <it>Populus </it>leaves, and show how treating genes as interacting, rather than individual, entities identifies new regulators compared to traditional genomics analysis. Although systems biology models should be used with care considering the complexity of regulatory programs and the limitations of current genomics data, methods describing interactions can provide hypotheses about the underlying cause of emergent properties and are needed if we are to identify target genes other than those constituting the "low hanging fruit" of genomic analysis.</p

The Reasonable Effectiveness of Randomness in Scalable and Integrative Gene Regulatory Network Inference and Beyond

Gene regulation is orchestrated by a vast number of molecules, including transcription factors and co-factors, chromatin regulators, as well as epigenetic mechanisms, and it has been shown that transcriptional misregulation, e.g., caused by mutations in regulatory sequences, is responsible for a plethora of diseases, including cancer, developmental or neurological disorders. As a consequence, decoding the architecture of gene regulatory networks has become one of the most important tasks in modern (computational) biology. However, to advance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in the transcriptional apparatus, we need scalable approaches that can deal with the increasing number of large-scale, high-resolution, biological datasets. In particular, such approaches need to be capable of efficiently integrating and exploiting the biological and technological heterogeneity of such datasets in order to best infer the underlying, highly dynamic regulatory networks, often in the absence of sufficient ground truth data for model training or testing. With respect to scalability, randomized approaches have proven to be a promising alternative to deterministic methods in computational biology. As an example, one of the top performing algorithms in a community challenge on gene regulatory network inference from transcriptomic data is based on a random forest regression model. In this concise survey, we aim to highlight how randomized methods may serve as a highly valuable tool, in particular, with increasing amounts of large-scale, biological experiments and datasets being collected. Given the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of the gene regulatory network inference problem, we hope our survey maybe helpful to both computational and biological scientists. It is our aim to provide a starting point for a dialogue about the concepts, benefits, and caveats of the toolbox of randomized methods, since unravelling the intricate web of highly dynamic, regulatory events will be one fundamental step in understanding the mechanisms of life and eventually developing efficient therapies to treat and cure diseases

Statistical Methods in Integrative Genomics

Statistical methods in integrative genomics aim to answer important biology questions by jointly analyzing multiple types of genomic data (vertical integration) or aggregating the same type of data across multiple studies (horizontal integration). In this article, we introduce different types of genomic data and data resources, and then review statistical methods of integrative genomics, with emphasis on the motivation and rationale of these methods. We conclude with some summary points and future research directions

Co-expression module analysis reveals biological processes, genomic gain, and regulatory mechanisms associated with breast cancer progression

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gene expression signatures are typically identified by correlating gene expression patterns to a disease phenotype of interest. However, individual gene-based signatures usually suffer from low reproducibility and interpretability.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed a novel algorithm Iterative Clique Enumeration (ICE) for identifying relatively independent maximal cliques as co-expression modules and a module-based approach to the analysis of gene expression data. Applying this approach on a public breast cancer dataset identified 19 modules whose expression levels were significantly correlated with tumor grade. The correlations were reproducible for 17 modules in an independent breast cancer dataset, and the reproducibility was considerably higher than that based on individual genes or modules identified by other algorithms. Sixteen out of the 17 modules showed significant enrichment in certain Gene Ontology (GO) categories. Specifically, modules related to cell proliferation and immune response were up-regulated in high-grade tumors while those related to cell adhesion was down-regulated. Further analyses showed that transcription factors NYFB, E2F1/E2F3, NRF1, and ELK1 were responsible for the up-regulation of the cell proliferation modules. IRF family and ETS family proteins were responsible for the up-regulation of the immune response modules. Moreover, inhibition of the PPARA signaling pathway may also play an important role in tumor progression. The module without GO enrichment was found to be associated with a potential genomic gain in 8q21-23 in high-grade tumors. The 17-module signature of breast tumor progression clustered patients into subgroups with significantly different relapse-free survival times. Namely, patients with lower cell proliferation and higher cell adhesion levels had significantly lower risk of recurrence, both for all patients (<it>p </it>= 0.004) and for those with grade 2 tumors (<it>p </it>= 0.017).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The ICE algorithm is effective in identifying relatively independent co-expression modules from gene co-expression networks and the module-based approach illustrated in this study provides a robust, interpretable, and mechanistic characterization of transcriptional changes.</p

Transcriptome-based Gene Networks for Systems-level Analysis of Plant Gene Functions

Present day genomic technologies are evolving at an unprecedented rate, allowing interrogation of cellular activities with increasing breadth and depth. However, we know very little about how the genome functions and what the identified genes do. The lack of functional annotations of genes greatly limits the post-analytical interpretation of new high throughput genomic datasets. For plant biologists, the problem is much severe. Less than 50% of all the identified genes in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and only about 20% of all genes in the crop model Oryza sativa have some aspects of their functions assigned. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop innovative methods to predict and expand on the currently available functional annotations of plant genes. With open-access catching the ‘pulse’ of modern day molecular research, an integration of the copious amount of transcriptome datasets allows rapid prediction of gene functions in specific biological contexts, which provide added evidence over traditional homology-based functional inference. The main goal of this dissertation was to develop data analysis strategies and tools broadly applicable in systems biology research. Two user friendly interactive web applications are presented: The Rice Regulatory Network (RRN) captures an abiotic-stress conditioned gene regulatory network designed to facilitate the identification of transcription factor targets during induction of various environmental stresses. The Arabidopsis Seed Active Network (SANe) is a transcriptional regulatory network that encapsulates various aspects of seed formation, including embryogenesis, endosperm development and seed-coat formation. Further, an edge-set enrichment analysis algorithm is proposed that uses network density as a parameter to estimate the gain or loss in correlation of pathways between two conditionally independent coexpression networks