bnem

MIRit is an R package that provides several methods for investigating the relationships between miRNAs and genes in different biological conditions. In particular, MIRit allows to explore the functions of dysregulated miRNAs, and makes it possible to identify miRNA-gene regulatory axes that control biological pathways, thus enabling the users to unveil the complexity of miRNA biology. MIRit is an all-in-one framework that aims to help researchers in all the central aspects of an integrative miRNA-mRNA analyses, from differential expression analysis to network characterization.

BioNERO aims to integrate all aspects of biological network inference in a single package, including data preprocessing, exploratory analyses, network inference, and analyses for biological interpretations. BioNERO can be used to infer gene coexpression networks (GCNs) and gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data. Additionally, it can be used to explore topological properties of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. GCN inference relies on the popular WGCNA algorithm. GRN inference is based on the "wisdom of the crowds" principle, which consists in inferring GRNs with multiple algorithms (here, CLR, GENIE3 and ARACNE) and calculating the average rank for each interaction pair. As all steps of network analyses are included in this package, BioNERO makes users avoid having to learn the syntaxes of several packages and how to communicate between them. Finally, users can also identify consensus modules across independent expression sets and calculate intra and interspecies module preservation statistics between different networks.

Mixture Nested Effects Models (mnem) is an extension of Nested Effects Models and allows for the analysis of single cell perturbation data provided by methods like Perturb-Seq (Dixit et al., 2016) or Crop-Seq (Datlinger et al., 2017). In those experiments each of many cells is perturbed by a knock-down of a specific gene, i.e. several cells are perturbed by a knock-down of gene A, several by a knock-down of gene B, ... and so forth. The observed read-out has to be multi-trait and in the case of the Perturb-/Crop-Seq gene are expression profiles for each cell. mnem uses a mixture model to simultaneously cluster the cell population into k clusters and and infer k networks causally linking the perturbed genes for each cluster. The mixture components are inferred via an expectation maximization algorithm.

RegulonDB has collected, harmonized and centralized data from hundreds of experiments for nearly two decades and is considered a point of reference for transcriptional regulation in Escherichia coli K12. Here, we present the regutools R package to facilitate programmatic access to RegulonDB data in computational biology. regutools provides researchers with the possibility of writing reproducible workflows with automated queries to RegulonDB. The regutools package serves as a bridge between RegulonDB data and the Bioconductor ecosystem by reusing the data structures and statistical methods powered by other Bioconductor packages. We demonstrate the integration of regutools with Bioconductor by analyzing transcription factor DNA binding sites and transcriptional regulatory networks from RegulonDB. We anticipate that regutools will serve as a useful building block in our progress to further our understanding of gene regulatory networks.

Reconstructing gene regulatory networks and transcription factor activity is crucial to understand biological processes and holds potential for developing personalized treatment. Yet, it is still an open problem as state-of-art algorithm are often not able to handle large amounts of data. Furthermore, many of the present methods predict numerous false positives and are unable to integrate other sources of information such as previously known interactions. Here we introduce KBoost, an algorithm that uses kernel PCA regression, boosting and Bayesian model averaging for fast and accurate reconstruction of gene regulatory networks. KBoost can also use a prior network built on previously known transcription factor targets. We have benchmarked KBoost using three different datasets against other high performing algorithms. The results show that our method compares favourably to other methods across datasets.

Takes as input an incomplete perturbation profile and differential gene expression in log odds and infers unobserved perturbations and augments observed ones. The inference is done by iteratively inferring a network from the perturbations and inferring perturbations from the network. The network inference is done by Nested Effects Models.