14,205 research outputs found
Robust Detection of Hierarchical Communities from Escherichia coli Gene Expression Data
Determining the functional structure of biological networks is a central goal
of systems biology. One approach is to analyze gene expression data to infer a
network of gene interactions on the basis of their correlated responses to
environmental and genetic perturbations. The inferred network can then be
analyzed to identify functional communities. However, commonly used algorithms
can yield unreliable results due to experimental noise, algorithmic
stochasticity, and the influence of arbitrarily chosen parameter values.
Furthermore, the results obtained typically provide only a simplistic view of
the network partitioned into disjoint communities and provide no information of
the relationship between communities. Here, we present methods to robustly
detect coregulated and functionally enriched gene communities and demonstrate
their application and validity for Escherichia coli gene expression data.
Applying a recently developed community detection algorithm to the network of
interactions identified with the context likelihood of relatedness (CLR)
method, we show that a hierarchy of network communities can be identified.
These communities significantly enrich for gene ontology (GO) terms, consistent
with them representing biologically meaningful groups. Further, analysis of the
most significantly enriched communities identified several candidate new
regulatory interactions. The robustness of our methods is demonstrated by
showing that a core set of functional communities is reliably found when
artificial noise, modeling experimental noise, is added to the data. We find
that noise mainly acts conservatively, increasing the relatedness required for
a network link to be reliably assigned and decreasing the size of the core
communities, rather than causing association of genes into new communities.Comment: Due to appear in PLoS Computational Biology. Supplementary Figure S1
was not uploaded but is available by contacting the author. 27 pages, 5
figures, 15 supplementary file
A Sparse Graph-Structured Lasso Mixed Model for Genetic Association with Confounding Correction
While linear mixed model (LMM) has shown a competitive performance in
correcting spurious associations raised by population stratification, family
structures, and cryptic relatedness, more challenges are still to be addressed
regarding the complex structure of genotypic and phenotypic data. For example,
geneticists have discovered that some clusters of phenotypes are more
co-expressed than others. Hence, a joint analysis that can utilize such
relatedness information in a heterogeneous data set is crucial for genetic
modeling.
We proposed the sparse graph-structured linear mixed model (sGLMM) that can
incorporate the relatedness information from traits in a dataset with
confounding correction. Our method is capable of uncovering the genetic
associations of a large number of phenotypes together while considering the
relatedness of these phenotypes. Through extensive simulation experiments, we
show that the proposed model outperforms other existing approaches and can
model correlation from both population structure and shared signals. Further,
we validate the effectiveness of sGLMM in the real-world genomic dataset on two
different species from plants and humans. In Arabidopsis thaliana data, sGLMM
behaves better than all other baseline models for 63.4% traits. We also discuss
the potential causal genetic variation of Human Alzheimer's disease discovered
by our model and justify some of the most important genetic loci.Comment: Code available at https://github.com/YeWenting/sGLM
A new Plasmodium vivax reference sequence with improved assembly of the subtelomeres reveals an abundance of pir genes
Plasmodium vivax is now the predominant cause of malaria in the Asia-Pacific, South America and Horn of Africa. Laboratory studies of this species are constrained by the inability to maintain the parasite in continuous ex vivo culture, but genomic approaches provide an alternative and complementary avenue to investigate the parasite's biology and epidemiology. To date, molecular studies of P. vivax have relied on the Salvador-I reference genome sequence, derived from a monkey-adapted strain from South America. However, the Salvador-I reference remains highly fragmented with over 2500 unassembled scaffolds. Using high-depth Illumina sequence data, we assembled and annotated a new reference sequence, PvP01, sourced directly from a patient from Papua Indonesia. Draft assemblies of isolates from China (PvC01) and Thailand (PvT01) were also prepared for comparative purposes. The quality of the PvP01 assembly is improved greatly over Salvador-I, with fragmentation reduced to 226 scaffolds. Detailed manual curation has ensured highly comprehensive annotation, with functions attributed to 58% core genes in PvP01 versus 38% in Salvador-I. The assemblies of PvP01, PvC01 and PvT01 are larger than that of Salvador-I (28-30 versus 27 Mb), owing to improved assembly of the subtelomeres. An extensive repertoire of over 1200 Plasmodium interspersed repeat (pir) genes were identified in PvP01 compared to 346 in Salvador-I, suggesting a vital role in parasite survival or development. The manually curated PvP01 reference and PvC01 and PvT01 draft assemblies are important new resources to study vivax malaria. PvP01 is maintained at GeneDB and ongoing curation will ensure continual improvements in assembly and annotation quality
What traits are carried on mobile genetic elements, and why?
Although similar to any other organism, prokaryotes can transfer genes vertically from mother cell to daughter cell, they can also exchange certain genes horizontally. Genes can move within and between genomes at fast rates because of mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Although mobile elements are fundamentally self-interested entities, and thus replicate for their own gain, they frequently carry genes beneficial for their hosts and/or the neighbours of their hosts. Many genes that are carried by mobile elements code for traits that are expressed outside of the cell. Such traits are involved in bacterial sociality, such as the production of public goods, which benefit a cell's neighbours, or the production of bacteriocins, which harm a cell's neighbours. In this study we review the patterns that are emerging in the types of genes carried by mobile elements, and discuss the evolutionary and ecological conditions under which mobile elements evolve to carry their peculiar mix of parasitic, beneficial and cooperative genes
Finding co-solvers on Twitter, with a little help from Linked Data
In this paper we propose a method for suggesting potential collaborators for solving innovation challenges online, based on their competence, similarity of interests and social proximity with the user. We rely on Linked Data to derive a measure of semantic relatedness that we use to enrich both user profiles and innovation problems with additional relevant topics, thereby improving the performance of co-solver recommendation. We evaluate this approach against state of the art methods for query enrichment based on the distribution of topics in user profiles, and demonstrate its usefulness in recommending collaborators that are both complementary in competence and compatible with the user. Our experiments are grounded using data from the social networking service Twitter.com
Statistical Modeling of Epistasis and Linkage Decay using Logic Regression
Logic regression has been recognized as a tool that can identify and model non-additive genetic interactions using Boolean logic groups. Logic regression, TASSEL-GLM and SAS-GLM were compared for analytical precision using a previously characterized model system to identify the best genetic model explaining epistatic interaction of vernalization-sensitivity in barley. A genetic model containing two molecular markers identified in vernalization response in barley was selected using logic regression while both TASSEL-GLM and SAS-GLM included spurious associations in their models. The results also suggest the logic regression can be used to identify dominant/recessive relationships between epistatic alleles through its use of conjugate
operators
Analysis of the human diseasome reveals phenotype modules across common, genetic, and infectious diseases
Phenotypes are the observable characteristics of an organism arising from its
response to the environment. Phenotypes associated with engineered and natural
genetic variation are widely recorded using phenotype ontologies in model
organisms, as are signs and symptoms of human Mendelian diseases in databases
such as OMIM and Orphanet. Exploiting these resources, several computational
methods have been developed for integration and analysis of phenotype data to
identify the genetic etiology of diseases or suggest plausible interventions. A
similar resource would be highly useful not only for rare and Mendelian
diseases, but also for common, complex and infectious diseases. We apply a
semantic text- mining approach to identify the phenotypes (signs and symptoms)
associated with over 8,000 diseases. We demonstrate that our method generates
phenotypes that correctly identify known disease-associated genes in mice and
humans with high accuracy. Using a phenotypic similarity measure, we generate a
human disease network in which diseases that share signs and symptoms cluster
together, and we use this network to identify phenotypic disease modules
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