12,975 research outputs found
GSAE: an autoencoder with embedded gene-set nodes for genomics functional characterization
Bioinformatics tools have been developed to interpret gene expression data at
the gene set level, and these gene set based analyses improve the biologists'
capability to discover functional relevance of their experiment design. While
elucidating gene set individually, inter gene sets association is rarely taken
into consideration. Deep learning, an emerging machine learning technique in
computational biology, can be used to generate an unbiased combination of gene
set, and to determine the biological relevance and analysis consistency of
these combining gene sets by leveraging large genomic data sets. In this study,
we proposed a gene superset autoencoder (GSAE), a multi-layer autoencoder model
with the incorporation of a priori defined gene sets that retain the crucial
biological features in the latent layer. We introduced the concept of the gene
superset, an unbiased combination of gene sets with weights trained by the
autoencoder, where each node in the latent layer is a superset. Trained with
genomic data from TCGA and evaluated with their accompanying clinical
parameters, we showed gene supersets' ability of discriminating tumor subtypes
and their prognostic capability. We further demonstrated the biological
relevance of the top component gene sets in the significant supersets. Using
autoencoder model and gene superset at its latent layer, we demonstrated that
gene supersets retain sufficient biological information with respect to tumor
subtypes and clinical prognostic significance. Superset also provides high
reproducibility on survival analysis and accurate prediction for cancer
subtypes.Comment: Presented in the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and
Medicine (ICIBM 2018) at Los Angeles, CA, USA and published in BMC Systems
Biology 2018, 12(Suppl 8):14
INTEGRATIVE ANALYSIS OF OMICS DATA IN ADULT GLIOMA AND OTHER TCGA CANCERS TO GUIDE PRECISION MEDICINE
Transcriptomic profiling and gene expression signatures have been widely applied as effective approaches for enhancing the molecular classification, diagnosis, prognosis or prediction of therapeutic response towards personalized therapy for cancer patients. Thanks to modern genome-wide profiling technology, scientists are able to build engines leveraging massive genomic variations and integrating with clinical data to identify “at risk” individuals for the sake of prevention, diagnosis and therapeutic interventions. In my graduate work for my Ph.D. thesis, I have investigated genomic sequencing data mining to comprehensively characterise molecular classifications and aberrant genomic events associated with clinical prognosis and treatment response, through applying high-dimensional omics genomic data to promote the understanding of gene signatures and somatic molecular alterations contributing to cancer progression and clinical outcomes. Following this motivation, my dissertation has been focused on the following three topics in translational genomics.
1) Characterization of transcriptomic plasticity and its association with the tumor microenvironment in glioblastoma (GBM). I have integrated transcriptomic, genomic, protein and clinical data to increase the accuracy of GBM classification, and identify the association between the GBM mesenchymal subtype and reduced tumorpurity, accompanied with increased presence of tumor-associated microglia. Then I have tackled the sole source of microglial as intrinsic tumor bulk but not their corresponding neurosphere cells through both transcriptional and protein level analysis using a panel of sphere-forming glioma cultures and their parent GBM samples.FurthermoreI have demonstrated my hypothesis through longitudinal analysis of paired primary and recurrent GBM samples that the phenotypic alterations of GBM subtypes are not due to intrinsic proneural-to-mesenchymal transition in tumor cells, rather it is intertwined with increased level of microglia upon disease recurrence. Collectively I have elucidated the critical role of tumor microenvironment (Microglia and macrophages from central nervous system) contributing to the intra-tumor heterogeneity and accurate classification of GBM patients based on transcriptomic profiling, which will not only significantly impact on clinical perspective but also pave the way for preclinical cancer research.
2) Identification of prognostic gene signatures that stratify adult diffuse glioma patientsharboring1p/19q co-deletions. I have compared multiple statistical methods and derived a gene signature significantly associated with survival by applying a machine learning algorithm. Then I have identified inflammatory response and acetylation activity that associated with malignant progression of 1p/19q co-deleted glioma. In addition, I showed this signature translates to other types of adult diffuse glioma, suggesting its universality in the pathobiology of other subset gliomas. My efforts on integrative data analysis of this highly curated data set usingoptimizedstatistical models will reflect the pending update to WHO classification system oftumorsin the central nervous system (CNS).
3) Comprehensive characterization of somatic fusion transcripts in Pan-Cancers. I have identified a panel of novel fusion transcripts across all of TCGA cancer types through transcriptomic profiling. Then I have predicted fusion proteins with kinase activity and hub function of pathway network based on the annotation of genetically mobile domains and functional domain architectures. I have evaluated a panel of in -frame gene fusions as potential driver mutations based on network fusion centrality hypothesis. I have also characterised the emerging complexity of genetic architecture in fusion transcripts through integrating genomic structure and somatic variants and delineating the distinct genomic patterns of fusion events across different cancer types. Overall my exploration of the pathogenetic impact and clinical relevance of candidate gene fusions have provided fundamental insights into the management of a subset of cancer patients by predicting the oncogenic signalling and specific drug targets encoded by these fusion genes.
Taken together, the translational genomic research I have conducted during my Ph.D. study will shed new light on precision medicine and contribute to the cancer research community. The novel classification concept, gene signature and fusion transcripts I have identified will address several hotly debated issues in translational genomics, such as complex interactions between tumor bulks and their adjacent microenvironments, prognostic markers for clinical diagnostics and personalized therapy, distinct patterns of genomic structure alterations and oncogenic events in different cancer types, therefore facilitating our understanding of genomic alterations and moving us towards the development of precision medicine
Sparse integrative clustering of multiple omics data sets
High resolution microarrays and second-generation sequencing platforms are
powerful tools to investigate genome-wide alterations in DNA copy number,
methylation and gene expression associated with a disease. An integrated
genomic profiling approach measures multiple omics data types simultaneously in
the same set of biological samples. Such approach renders an integrated data
resolution that would not be available with any single data type. In this
study, we use penalized latent variable regression methods for joint modeling
of multiple omics data types to identify common latent variables that can be
used to cluster patient samples into biologically and clinically relevant
disease subtypes. We consider lasso [J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 58 (1996)
267-288], elastic net [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 67 (2005)
301-320] and fused lasso [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 67 (2005)
91-108] methods to induce sparsity in the coefficient vectors, revealing
important genomic features that have significant contributions to the latent
variables. An iterative ridge regression is used to compute the sparse
coefficient vectors. In model selection, a uniform design [Monographs on
Statistics and Applied Probability (1994) Chapman & Hall] is used to seek
"experimental" points that scattered uniformly across the search domain for
efficient sampling of tuning parameter combinations. We compared our method to
sparse singular value decomposition (SVD) and penalized Gaussian mixture model
(GMM) using both real and simulated data sets. The proposed method is applied
to integrate genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic data for subtype analysis
in breast and lung cancer data sets.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS578 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Homogeneous datasets of triple negative breast cancers enable the identification of novel prognostic and predictive signatures
Background: Current prognostic gene signatures for breast cancer mainly reflect proliferation status and have limited value in triple-negative (TNBC) cancers. The identification of prognostic signatures from TNBC cohorts was limited in the past due to small sample sizes.
Methodology/Principal Findings: We assembled all currently publically available TNBC gene expression datasets generated on Affymetrix gene chips. Inter-laboratory variation was minimized by filtering methods for both samples and genes. Supervised analysis was performed to identify prognostic signatures from 394 cases which were subsequently tested on an independent validation cohort (n = 261 cases).
Conclusions/Significance: Using two distinct false discovery rate thresholds, 25% and <3.5%, a larger (n = 264 probesets) and a smaller (n = 26 probesets) prognostic gene sets were identified and used as prognostic predictors. Most of these genes were positively associated with poor prognosis and correlated to metagenes for inflammation and angiogenesis. No correlation to other previously published prognostic signatures (recurrence score, genomic grade index, 70-gene signature, wound response signature, 7-gene immune response module, stroma derived prognostic predictor, and a medullary like signature) was observed. In multivariate analyses in the validation cohort the two signatures showed hazard ratios of 4.03 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.71–9.48; P = 0.001) and 4.08 (95% CI 1.79–9.28; P = 0.001), respectively. The 10-year event-free survival was 70% for the good risk and 20% for the high risk group. The 26-gene signatures had modest predictive value (AUC = 0.588) to predict response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, however, the combination of a B-cell metagene with the prognostic signatures increased its response predictive value. We identified a 264-gene prognostic signature for TNBC which is unrelated to previously known prognostic signatures
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Discovery of molecular subtypes in leiomyosarcoma through integrative molecular profiling.
Leiomyosarcoma (LMS) is a soft tissue tumor with a significant degree of morphologic and molecular heterogeneity. We used integrative molecular profiling to discover and characterize molecular subtypes of LMS. Gene expression profiling was performed on 51 LMS samples. Unsupervised clustering showed three reproducible LMS clusters. Array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) was performed on 20 LMS samples and showed that the molecular subtypes defined by gene expression showed distinct genomic changes. Tumors from the muscle-enriched cluster showed significantly increased copy number changes (P=0.04). A majority of the muscle-enriched cases showed loss at 16q24, which contains Fanconi anemia, complementation group A, known to have an important role in DNA repair, and loss at 1p36, which contains PRDM16, of which loss promotes muscle differentiation. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was performed on LMS tissue microarrays (n=377) for five markers with high levels of messenger RNA in the muscle-enriched cluster (ACTG2, CASQ2, SLMAP, CFL2 and MYLK) and showed significantly correlated expression of the five proteins (all pairwise P<0.005). Expression of the five markers was associated with improved disease-specific survival in a multivariate Cox regression analysis (P<0.04). In this analysis that combined gene expression profiling, aCGH and IHC, we characterized distinct molecular LMS subtypes, provided insight into their pathogenesis, and identified prognostic biomarkers
Predictive genomics: A cancer hallmark network framework for predicting tumor clinical phenotypes using genome sequencing data
We discuss a cancer hallmark network framework for modelling
genome-sequencing data to predict cancer clonal evolution and associated
clinical phenotypes. Strategies of using this framework in conjunction with
genome sequencing data in an attempt to predict personalized drug targets, drug
resistance, and metastasis for a cancer patient, as well as cancer risks for a
healthy individual are discussed. Accurate prediction of cancer clonal
evolution and clinical phenotypes will have substantial impact on timely
diagnosis, personalized management and prevention of cancer.Comment: 5 figs, related papers, visit lab homepage:
http://www.cancer-systemsbiology.org, Seminar in Cancer Biology, 201
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