bsseq

Motivation: The understanding of cancer mechanism requires the identification of genes playing a role in the development of the pathology and the characterization of their role (notably oncogenes and tumor suppressors). Results: We present an R/bioconductor package called MoonlightR which returns a list of candidate driver genes for specific cancer types on the basis of TCGA expression data. The method first infers gene regulatory networks and then carries out a functional enrichment analysis (FEA) (implementing an upstream regulator analysis, URA) to score the importance of well-known biological processes with respect to the studied cancer type. Eventually, by means of random forests, MoonlightR predicts two specific roles for the candidate driver genes: i) tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) and ii) oncogenes (OCGs). As a consequence, this methodology does not only identify genes playing a dual role (e.g. TSG in one cancer type and OCG in another) but also helps in elucidating the biological processes underlying their specific roles. In particular, MoonlightR can be used to discover OCGs and TSGs in the same cancer type. This may help in answering the question whether some genes change role between early stages (I, II) and late stages (III, IV) in breast cancer. In the future, this analysis could be useful to determine the causes of different resistances to chemotherapeutic treatments.

Functions to summarize DNA methylation data using regional principal components. Regional principal components are computed using principal components analysis within genomic regions to summarize the variability in methylation levels across CpGs. The number of principal components is chosen using either the Marcenko-Pasteur or Gavish-Donoho method to identify relevant signal in the data.

Provides functions to detect and correct for batch effects in DNA methylation data. The core function is based on latent factor models and can also be used to predict missing values in any other matrix containing real numbers.

Methods for working with Illumina arrays using gdsfmt.

A test harness for bsseq loading of Biscuit output, summarization of WGBS data over defined regions and in mappable samples, with or without imputation, dropping of mostly-NA rows, age estimates, etc.

A novel approach utilizing a homogeneous hidden Markov model. And effectively model untransformed beta values. To identify DMCs while considering the spatial. Correlation of the adjacent CpG sites.