Cancer cells exploit an orphan RNA to drive metastatic progression.

Here we performed a systematic search to identify breast-cancer-specific small noncoding RNAs, which we have collectively termed orphan noncoding RNAs (oncRNAs). We subsequently discovered that one of these oncRNAs, which originates from the 3' end of TERC, acts as a regulator of gene expression and is a robust promoter of breast cancer metastasis. This oncRNA, which we have named T3p, exerts its prometastatic effects by acting as an inhibitor of RISC complex activity and increasing the expression of the prometastatic genes NUPR1 and PANX2. Furthermore, we have shown that oncRNAs are present in cancer-cell-derived extracellular vesicles, raising the possibility that these circulating oncRNAs may also have a role in non-cell autonomous disease pathogenesis. Additionally, these circulating oncRNAs present a novel avenue for cancer fingerprinting using liquid biopsies

NetDiff – Bayesian model selection for differential gene regulatory network inference

Differential networks allow us to better understand the changes in cellular processes that are exhibited in conditions of interest, identifying variations in gene regulation or protein interaction between, for example, cases and controls, or in response to external stimuli. Here we present a novel methodology for the inference of differential gene regulatory networks from gene expression microarray data. Specifically we apply a Bayesian model selection approach to compare models of conserved and varying network structure, and use Gaussian graphical models to represent the network structures. We apply a variational inference approach to the learning of Gaussian graphical models of gene regulatory networks, that enables us to perform Bayesian model selection that is significantly more computationally efficient than Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Our method is demonstrated to be more robust than independent analysis of data from multiple conditions when applied to synthetic network data, generating fewer false positive predictions of differential edges. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on real world gene expression microarray data by applying it to existing data from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis cases with and without mutations in C9orf72, and controls, where we are able to identify differential network interactions for further investigation

Genome-wide inference of regulatory networks in Streptomyces coelicolor

Background: The onset of antibiotics production in Streptomyces species is co-ordinated with differentiation events. An understanding of the genetic circuits that regulate these coupled biological phenomena is essential to discover and engineer the pharmacologically important natural products made by these species. The availability of genomic tools and access to a large warehouse of transcriptome data for the model organism, Streptomyces coelicolor, provides incentive to decipher the intricacies of the regulatory cascades and develop biologically meaningful hypotheses. Results: In this study, more than 500 samples of genome-wide temporal transcriptome data, comprising wild-type and more than 25 regulatory gene mutants of Streptomyces coelicolor probed across multiple stress and medium conditions, were investigated. Information based on transcript and functional similarity was used to update a previously-predicted whole-genome operon map and further applied to predict transcriptional networks constituting modules enriched in diverse functions such as secondary metabolism, and sigma factor. The predicted network displays a scale-free architecture with a small-world property observed in many biological networks. The networks were further investigated to identify functionally-relevant modules that exhibit functional coherence and a consensus motif in the promoter elements indicative of DNA-binding elements. Conclusions: Despite the enormous experimental as well as computational challenges, a systems approach for integrating diverse genome-scale datasets to elucidate complex regulatory networks is beginning to emerge. We present an integrated analysis of transcriptome data and genomic features to refine a whole-genome operon map and to construct regulatory networks at the cistron level in Streptomyces coelicolor. The functionally-relevant modules identified in this study pose as potential targets for further studies and verification.

Ectopic A-lattice seams destabilize microtubules

Natural microtubules typically include one A-lattice seam within an otherwise helically symmetric B-lattice tube. It is currently unclear how A-lattice seams influence microtubule dynamic instability. Here we find that including extra A-lattice seams in GMPCPP microtubules, structural analogues of the GTP caps of dynamic microtubules, destabilizes them, enhancing their median shrinkage rate by >20-fold. Dynamic microtubules nucleated by seeds containing extra A-lattice seams have growth rates similar to microtubules nucleated by B-lattice seeds, yet have increased catastrophe frequencies at both ends. Furthermore, binding B-lattice GDP microtubules to a rigor kinesin surface stabilizes them against shrinkage, whereas microtubules with extra A-lattice seams are stabilized only slightly. Our data suggest that introducing extra A-lattice seams into dynamic microtubules destabilizes them by destabilizing their GTP caps. On this basis, we propose that the single A-lattice seam of natural B-lattice MTs may act as a trigger point, and potentially a regulation point, for catastrophe

Using GeneReg to construct time delay gene regulatory networks

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Understanding gene expression and regulation is essential for understanding biological mechanisms. Because gene expression profiling has been widely used in basic biological research, especially in transcription regulation studies, we have developed GeneReg, an easy-to-use R package, to construct gene regulatory networks from time course gene expression profiling data; More importantly, this package can provide information about time delays between expression change in a regulator and that of its target genes.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>The R package GeneReg is based on time delay linear regression, which can generate a model of the expression levels of regulators at a given time point against the expression levels of their target genes at a later time point. There are two parameters in the model, time delay and regulation coefficient. Time delay is the time lag during which expression change of the regulator is transmitted to change in target gene expression. Regulation coefficient expresses the regulation effect: a positive regulation coefficient indicates activation and negative indicates repression. GeneReg was implemented on a real Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle dataset; more than thirty percent of the modeled regulations, based entirely on gene expression files, were found to be consistent with previous discoveries from known databases.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>GeneReg is an easy-to-use, simple, fast R package for gene regulatory network construction from short time course gene expression data. It may be applied to study time-related biological processes such as cell cycle, cell differentiation, or causal inference.</p

Integrative inference of gene-regulatory networks in Escherichia coli using information theoretic concepts and sequence analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Although <it>Escherichia coli </it>is one of the best studied model organisms, a comprehensive understanding of its gene regulation is not yet achieved. There exist many approaches to reconstruct regulatory interaction networks from gene expression experiments. Mutual information based approaches are most useful for large-scale network inference.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We used a three-step approach in which we combined gene regulatory network inference based on directed information (DTI) and sequence analysis. DTI values were calculated on a set of gene expression profiles from 19 time course experiments extracted from the Many Microbes Microarray Database. Focusing on influences between pairs of genes in which one partner encodes a transcription factor (TF) we derived a network which contains 878 TF - gene interactions of which 166 are known according to RegulonDB. Afterward, we selected a subset of 109 interactions that could be confirmed by the presence of a phylogenetically conserved binding site of the respective regulator. By this second step, the fraction of known interactions increased from 19% to 60%. In the last step, we checked the 44 of the 109 interactions not yet included in RegulonDB for functional relationships between the regulator and the target and, thus, obtained ten TF - target gene interactions. Five of them concern the regulator LexA and have already been reported in the literature. The remaining five influences describe regulations by Fis (with two novel targets), PhdR, PhoP, and KdgR. For the validation of our approach, one of them, the regulation of lipoate synthase (LipA) by the pyruvate-sensing pyruvate dehydrogenate repressor (PdhR), was experimentally checked and confirmed.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We predicted a set of five novel TF - target gene interactions in <it>E. coli</it>. One of them, the regulation of <it>lipA </it>by the transcriptional regulator PdhR was validated experimentally. Furthermore, we developed DTInfer, a new R-package for the inference of gene-regulatory networks from microarrays using directed information.</p

Bayesian approaches to reverse engineer cellular systems: a simulation study on nonlinear Gaussian networks

BACKGROUND. Reverse engineering cellular networks is currently one of the most challenging problems in systems biology. Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) seem to be particularly suitable for inferring relationships between cellular variables from the analysis of time series measurements of mRNA or protein concentrations. As evaluating inference results on a real dataset is controversial, the use of simulated data has been proposed. However, DBN approaches that use continuous variables, thus avoiding the information loss associated with discretization, have not yet been extensively assessed, and most of the proposed approaches have dealt with linear Gaussian models. RESULTS. We propose a generalization of dynamic Gaussian networks to accommodate nonlinear dependencies between variables. As a benchmark dataset to test the new approach, we used data from a mathematical model of cell cycle control in budding yeast that realistically reproduces the complexity of a cellular system. We evaluated the ability of the networks to describe the dynamics of cellular systems and their precision in reconstructing the true underlying causal relationships between variables. We also tested the robustness of the results by analyzing the effect of noise on the data, and the impact of a different sampling time. CONCLUSION. The results confirmed that DBNs with Gaussian models can be effectively exploited for a first level analysis of data from complex cellular systems. The inferred models are parsimonious and have a satisfying goodness of fit. Furthermore, the networks not only offer a phenomenological description of the dynamics of cellular systems, but are also able to suggest hypotheses concerning the causal interactions between variables. The proposed nonlinear generalization of Gaussian models yielded models characterized by a slightly lower goodness of fit than the linear model, but a better ability to recover the true underlying connections between variables.Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research; National Institutes of Health & National Human Genome Research Institute (HG003354-01A2); Collegio Ghislieri, Pavia Italy fellowshi

Characterizing genomic alterations in cancer by complementary functional associations.

Systematic efforts to sequence the cancer genome have identified large numbers of mutations and copy number alterations in human cancers. However, elucidating the functional consequences of these variants, and their interactions to drive or maintain oncogenic states, remains a challenge in cancer research. We developed REVEALER, a computational method that identifies combinations of mutually exclusive genomic alterations correlated with functional phenotypes, such as the activation or gene dependency of oncogenic pathways or sensitivity to a drug treatment. We used REVEALER to uncover complementary genomic alterations associated with the transcriptional activation of β-catenin and NRF2, MEK-inhibitor sensitivity, and KRAS dependency. REVEALER successfully identified both known and new associations, demonstrating the power of combining functional profiles with extensive characterization of genomic alterations in cancer genomes

Insights gained from the reverse engineering of gene networks in keloid fibroblasts

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Keloids are protrusive claw-like scars that have a propensity to recur even after surgery, and its molecular etiology remains elusive. The goal of reverse engineering is to infer gene networks from observational data, thus providing insight into the inner workings of a cell. However, most attempts at modeling biological networks have been done using simulated data. This study aims to highlight some of the issues involved in working with experimental data, and at the same time gain some insights into the transcriptional regulatory mechanism present in keloid fibroblasts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Microarray data from our previous study was combined with microarray data obtained from the literature as well as new microarray data generated by our group. For the physical approach, we used the fREDUCE algorithm for correlating expression values to binding motifs. For the influence approach, we compared the Bayesian algorithm BANJO with the information theoretic method ARACNE in terms of performance in recovering known influence networks obtained from the KEGG database. In addition, we also compared the performance of different normalization methods as well as different types of gene networks.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using the physical approach, we found consensus sequences that were active in the keloid condition, as well as some sequences that were responsive to steroids, a commonly used treatment for keloids. From the influence approach, we found that BANJO was better at recovering the gene networks compared to ARACNE and that transcriptional networks were better suited for network recovery compared to cytokine-receptor interaction networks and intracellular signaling networks. We also found that the NFKB transcriptional network that was inferred from normal fibroblast data was more accurate compared to that inferred from keloid data, suggesting a more robust network in the keloid condition.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Consensus sequences that were found from this study are possible transcription factor binding sites and could be explored for developing future keloid treatments or for improving the efficacy of current steroid treatments. We also found that the combination of the Bayesian algorithm, RMA normalization and transcriptional networks gave the best reconstruction results and this could serve as a guide for future influence approaches dealing with experimental data.</p