Inferring Regulatory Networks from Expression Data Using Tree-Based Methods

One of the pressing open problems of computational systems biology is the elucidation of the topology of genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) using high throughput genomic data, in particular microarray gene expression data. The Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods (DREAM) challenge aims to evaluate the success of GRN inference algorithms on benchmarks of simulated data. In this article, we present GENIE3, a new algorithm for the inference of GRNs that was best performer in the DREAM4 In Silico Multifactorial challenge. GENIE3 decomposes the prediction of a regulatory network between p genes into p different regression problems. In each of the regression problems, the expression pattern of one of the genes (target gene) is predicted from the expression patterns of all the other genes (input genes), using tree-based ensemble methods Random Forests or Extra-Trees. The importance of an input gene in the prediction of the target gene expression pattern is taken as an indication of a putative regulatory link. Putative regulatory links are then aggregated over all genes to provide a ranking of interactions from which the whole network is reconstructed. In addition to performing well on the DREAM4 In Silico Multifactorial challenge simulated data, we show that GENIE3 compares favorably with existing algorithms to decipher the genetic regulatory network of Escherichia coli. It doesn''t make any assumption about the nature of gene regulation, can deal with combinatorial and non-linear interactions, produces directed GRNs, and is fast and scalable. In conclusion, we propose a new algorithm for GRN inference that performs well on both synthetic and real gene expression data. The algorithm, based on feature selection with tree-based ensemble methods, is simple and generic, making it adaptable to other types of genomic data and interactions.     

A New Asynchronous Parallel Algorithm for Inferring Large-Scale Gene Regulatory Networks

The reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from high-throughput experimental data has been considered one of the most important issues in systems biology research. With the development of high-throughput technology and the complexity of biological problems, we need to reconstruct GRNs that contain thousands of genes. However, when many existing algorithms are used to handle these large-scale problems, they will encounter two important issues: low accuracy and high computational cost. To overcome these difficulties, the main goal of this study is to design an effective parallel algorithm to infer large-scale GRNs based on high-performance parallel computing environments. In this study, we proposed a novel asynchronous parallel framework to improve the accuracy and lower the time complexity of large-scale GRN inference by combining splitting technology and ordinary differential equation (ODE)-based optimization. The presented algorithm uses the sparsity and modularity of GRNs to split whole large-scale GRNs into many small-scale modular subnetworks. Through the ODE-based optimization of all subnetworks in parallel and their asynchronous communications, we can easily obtain the parameters of the whole network. To test the performance of the proposed approach, we used well-known benchmark datasets from Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods challenge (DREAM), experimentally determined GRN of Escherichia coli and one published dataset that contains more than 10 thousand genes to compare the proposed approach with several popular algorithms on the same high-performance computing environments in terms of both accuracy and time complexity. The numerical results demonstrate that our parallel algorithm exhibits obvious superiority in inferring large-scale GRNs.     

Loss of Connectivity in Cancer Co-Expression Networks

Differential gene expression profiling studies have lead to the identification of several disease biomarkers. However, the oncogenic alterations in coding regions can modify the gene functions without affecting their own expression profiles. Moreover, post-translational modifications can modify the activity of the coded protein without altering the expression levels of the coding gene, but eliciting variations to the expression levels of the regulated genes. These considerations motivate the study of the rewiring of networks co-expressed genes as a consequence of the aforementioned alterations in order to complement the informative content of differential expression. We analyzed 339 mRNAomes of five distinct cancer types to find single genes that presented co-expression patterns strongly differentiated between normal and tumor phenotypes. Our analysis of differentially connected genes indicates the loss of connectivity as a common topological trait of cancer networks, and unveils novel candidate cancer genes. Moreover, our integrated approach that combines the differential expression together with the differential connectivity improves the classic enrichment pathway analysis providing novel insights on putative cancer gene biosystems not still fully investigated.     

Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks by Singular Value Decomposition and Gravitation Field Algorithm

Reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is of utmost interest and has become a challenge computational problem in system biology. However, every existing inference algorithm from gene expression profiles has its own advantages and disadvantages. In particular, the effectiveness and efficiency of every previous algorithm is not high enough. In this work, we proposed a novel inference algorithm from gene expression data based on differential equation model. In this algorithm, two methods were included for inferring GRNs. Before reconstructing GRNs, singular value decomposition method was used to decompose gene expression data, determine the algorithm solution space, and get all candidate solutions of GRNs. In these generated family of candidate solutions, gravitation field algorithm was modified to infer GRNs, used to optimize the criteria of differential equation model, and search the best network structure result. The proposed algorithm is validated on both the simulated scale-free network and real benchmark gene regulatory network in networks database. Both the Bayesian method and the traditional differential equation model were also used to infer GRNs, and the results were used to compare with the proposed algorithm in our work. And genetic algorithm and simulated annealing were also used to evaluate gravitation field algorithm. The cross-validation results confirmed the effectiveness of our algorithm, which outperforms significantly other previous algorithms.     

乳腺癌致病microRNA调控网络的识别与生物信息学分析

目的:构建并解析乳腺癌致病microRNA(miRNA)调控网络,探究其在乳腺癌发生发展中的调控机制。方法:整合TCGA、ENCODE、Fantom等公共数据库资源,得到miRNA、转录因子和基因候选调控关系数据,结合差异表达、变异系数与PCA,构建乳腺癌miRNA调控网络,解析调控网络的度中心性与聚类系数,使用DAVID进行功能富集分析,构建Cox回归模型作生存曲线。结果:共识别miRNA调控网络262个,其中包含5个显著差异表达miRNA,8个转录因子和130个基因。通过功能富集分析发现这些miRNA靶基因显著参与细胞周期、细胞分化、细胞生长、转移等转录后调控的肿瘤生物进程,并与FoxO信号通路、p53信号通路、基因监测通路等信号通路高度相关。通过分析生存曲线发现hsa-mir-144与hsa-mir-133a-2显著与乳腺癌患者生存相关。结论:识别的乳腺癌致病miRNA调控网络中miRNA之间有相互作用,且网络整体功能不仅受hub网络影响,也受元件自身特性影响,这些miRNA靶基因显著富集于肿瘤相关生物学进程与信号通路中。     

基于有序条件互信息和有限父结点构建基因调控网络

基因调控网络重建是功能基因组研究的基础,有助于理解基因间的调控机理,探索复杂的生命系统及其本质.针对传统贝叶斯方法计算复杂度高、仅能构建小规模基因调控网络,而信息论方法假阳性边较多、且不能推测基因因果定向问题.本文基于有序条件互信息和有限父结点,提出一种快速构建基因调控网络的OCMIPN算法.OCMIPN方法首先采用有序条件互信息构建基因调控相关网络;然后根据基因调控网络拓扑先验知识,限制每个基因结点的父结点数量,利用贝叶斯方法推断出基因调控网络结构,有效降低算法的时间计算复杂度.人工合成网络及真实生物分子网络上仿真实验结果表明:OCMIPN方法不仅能构建出高精度的基因调控网络,且时间计算复杂度较低,其性能优于LASSO、ARACNE、Scan BMA和LBN等现有流行算法.     

Conserved Non-Coding Regulatory Signatures in Arabidopsis Co-Expressed Gene Modules

Complex traits and other polygenic processes require coordinated gene expression. Co-expression networks model mRNA co-expression: the product of gene regulatory networks. To identify regulatory mechanisms underlying coordinated gene expression in a tissue-enriched context, ten Arabidopsis thaliana co-expression networks were constructed after manually sorting 4,566 RNA profiling datasets into aerial, flower, leaf, root, rosette, seedling, seed, shoot, whole plant, and global (all samples combined) groups. Collectively, the ten networks contained 30% of the measurable genes of Arabidopsis and were circumscribed into 5,491 modules. Modules were scrutinized for cis regulatory mechanisms putatively encoded in conserved non-coding sequences (CNSs) previously identified as remnants of a whole genome duplication event. We determined the non-random association of 1,361 unique CNSs to 1,904 co-expression network gene modules. Furthermore, the CNS elements were placed in the context of known gene regulatory networks (GRNs) by connecting 250 CNS motifs with known GRN cis elements. Our results provide support for a regulatory role of some CNS elements and suggest the functional consequences of CNS activation of co-expression in specific gene sets dispersed throughout the genome.     

Gene Regulatory Networks in the Genomics Era

<正>The precise regulation of gene expression is critical to the normal development and biological function of all organisms. Dysregulation of gene expression during early development can result in a spectrum of failures ranging from minor defects to the termination of development. In adult life, dysregulation ncan lead to     

Evolving Robust Gene Regulatory Networks

Design and implementation of robust network modules is essential for construction of complex biological systems through hierarchical assembly of ‘parts’ and ‘devices’. The robustness of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is ascribed chiefly to the underlying topology. The automatic designing capability of GRN topology that can exhibit robust behavior can dramatically change the current practice in synthetic biology. A recent study shows that Darwinian evolution can gradually develop higher topological robustness. Subsequently, this work presents an evolutionary algorithm that simulates natural evolution in silico, for identifying network topologies that are robust to perturbations. We present a Monte Carlo based method for quantifying topological robustness and designed a fitness approximation approach for efficient calculation of topological robustness which is computationally very intensive. The proposed framework was verified using two classic GRN behaviors: oscillation and bistability, although the framework is generalized for evolving other types of responses. The algorithm identified robust GRN architectures which were verified using different analysis and comparison. Analysis of the results also shed light on the relationship among robustness, cooperativity and complexity. This study also shows that nature has already evolved very robust architectures for its crucial systems; hence simulation of this natural process can be very valuable for designing robust biological systems.     

Discovering Study-Specific Gene Regulatory Networks

Microarrays are commonly used in biology because of their ability to simultaneously measure thousands of genes under different conditions. Due to their structure, typically containing a high amount of variables but far fewer samples, scalable network analysis techniques are often employed. In particular, consensus approaches have been recently used that combine multiple microarray studies in order to find networks that are more robust. The purpose of this paper, however, is to combine multiple microarray studies to automatically identify subnetworks that are distinctive to specific experimental conditions rather than common to them all. To better understand key regulatory mechanisms and how they change under different conditions, we derive unique networks from multiple independent networks built using glasso which goes beyond standard correlations. This involves calculating cluster prediction accuracies to detect the most predictive genes for a specific set of conditions. We differentiate between accuracies calculated using cross-validation within a selected cluster of studies (the intra prediction accuracy) and those calculated on a set of independent studies belonging to different study clusters (inter prediction accuracy). Finally, we compare our method''s results to related state-of-the art techniques. We explore how the proposed pipeline performs on both synthetic data and real data (wheat and Fusarium). Our results show that subnetworks can be identified reliably that are specific to subsets of studies and that these networks reflect key mechanisms that are fundamental to the experimental conditions in each of those subsets.     

Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks Using Time-Series Data: A Survey

The advent of high-throughput technology like microarrays has provided the platform for studying how different cellular components work together, thus created an enormous interest in mathematically modeling biological network, particularly gene regulatory network (GRN). Of particular interest is the modeling and inference on time-series data, which capture a more thorough picture of the system than non-temporal data do. We have given an extensive review of methodologies that have been used on time-series data. In realizing that validation is an impartible part of the inference paradigm, we have also presented a discussion on the principles and challenges in performance evaluation of different methods. This survey gives a panoramic view on these topics, with anticipation that the readers will be inspired to improve and/or expand GRN inference and validation tool repository.     

FastGCN: A GPU Accelerated Tool for Fast Gene Co-Expression Networks

Gene co-expression networks comprise one type of valuable biological networks. Many methods and tools have been published to construct gene co-expression networks; however, most of these tools and methods are inconvenient and time consuming for large datasets. We have developed a user-friendly, accelerated and optimized tool for constructing gene co-expression networks that can fully harness the parallel nature of GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) architectures. Genetic entropies were exploited to filter out genes with no or small expression changes in the raw data preprocessing step. Pearson correlation coefficients were then calculated. After that, we normalized these coefficients and employed the False Discovery Rate to control the multiple tests. At last, modules identification was conducted to construct the co-expression networks. All of these calculations were implemented on a GPU. We also compressed the coefficient matrix to save space. We compared the performance of the GPU implementation with those of multi-core CPU implementations with 16 CPU threads, single-thread C/C++ implementation and single-thread R implementation. Our results show that GPU implementation largely outperforms single-thread C/C++ implementation and single-thread R implementation, and GPU implementation outperforms multi-core CPU implementation when the number of genes increases. With the test dataset containing 16,000 genes and 590 individuals, we can achieve greater than 63 times the speed using a GPU implementation compared with a single-thread R implementation when 50 percent of genes were filtered out and about 80 times the speed when no genes were filtered out.     

Modeling of Hysteresis in Gene Regulatory Networks

Hysteresis, observed in many gene regulatory networks, has a pivotal impact on biological systems, which enhances the robustness of cell functions. In this paper, a general model is proposed to describe the hysteretic gene regulatory network by combining the hysteresis component and the transient dynamics. The Bouc-Wen hysteresis model is modified to describe the hysteresis component in the mammalian gene regulatory networks. Rigorous mathematical analysis on the dynamical properties of the model is presented to ensure the bounded-input-bounded-output (BIBO) stability and demonstrates that the original Bouc-Wen model can only generate a clockwise hysteresis loop while the modified model can describe both clockwise and counter clockwise hysteresis loops. Simulation studies have shown that the hysteresis loops from our model are consistent with the experimental observations in three mammalian gene regulatory networks and two E.coli gene regulatory networks, which demonstrate the ability and accuracy of the mathematical model to emulate natural gene expression behavior with hysteresis. A comparison study has also been conducted to show that this model fits the experiment data significantly better than previous ones in the literature. The successful modeling of the hysteresis in all the five hysteretic gene regulatory networks suggests that the new model has the potential to be a unified framework for modeling hysteresis in gene regulatory networks and provide better understanding of the general mechanism that drives the hysteretic function.     

IPCA-CMI: An Algorithm for Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks based on a Combination of PCA-CMI and MIT Score

Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is a major issue in systems biology, which explicitly characterizes regulatory processes in the cell. The Path Consistency Algorithm based on Conditional Mutual Information (PCA-CMI) is a well-known method in this field. In this study, we introduce a new algorithm (IPCA-CMI) and apply it to a number of gene expression data sets in order to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm to infer GRNs. The IPCA-CMI can be categorized as a hybrid method, using the PCA-CMI and Hill-Climbing algorithm (based on MIT score). The conditional dependence between variables is determined by the conditional mutual information test which can take into account both linear and nonlinear genes relations. IPCA-CMI uses a score and search method and defines a selected set of variables which is adjacent to one of or Y. This set is used to determine the dependency between X and Y. This method is compared with the method of evaluating dependency by PCA-CMI in which the set of variables adjacent to both X and Y, is selected. The merits of the IPCA-CMI are evaluated by applying this algorithm to the DREAM3 Challenge data sets with n variables and n samples () and to experimental data from Escherichia coil containing 9 variables and 9 samples. Results indicate that applying the IPCA-CMI improves the precision of learning the structure of the GRNs in comparison with that of the PCA-CMI.     

Transposable Elements in the Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks

Russian Journal of Genetics - Over the past decade, there has been an active study of the interactions between the population of transposable elements (TEs) and the rest of the genome. Many...