cfTools
The cfTools R package provides methods for cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation data analysis to facilitate cfDNA-based studies. Given the methylation sequencing data of a cfDNA sample, for each cancer marker or tissue marker, we deconvolve the tumor-derived or tissue-specific reads from all reads falling in the marker region. Our read-based deconvolution algorithm exploits the pervasiveness of DNA methylation for signal enhancement, therefore can sensitively identify a trace amount of tumor-specific or tissue-specific cfDNA in plasma. cfTools provides functions for (1) cancer detection: sensitively detect tumor-derived cfDNA and estimate the tumor-derived cfDNA fraction (tumor burden); (2) tissue deconvolution: infer the tissue type composition and the cfDNA fraction of multiple tissue types for a plasma cfDNA sample. These functions can serve as foundations for more advanced cfDNA-based studies, including cancer diagnosis and disease monitoring.
- Repository
- github.com/jasminezhoulab/cftools
Source attribution
- Bioconductor — cfTools
Related resources
TENET identifies key transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements (REs) linked to a specific cell type by finding significantly correlated differences in gene expression and RE DNA methylation between case and control input datasets, and identifying the top genes by number of significant RE DNA methylation site links. It also includes many tools for visualization and analysis of the results, including plots displaying and comparing methylation and expression data and methylation site link counts, survival analysis, TF motif searching in the vicinity of linked RE DNA methylation sites, custom TAD and peak overlap analysis, and UCSC Genome Browser track file generation. A utility function is also provided to download methylation, expression, and patient survival data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for use in TENET or other analyses.
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Permutation analysis, based on Monte Carlo sampling, for testing the hypothesis that the number of conserved differentially methylated elements, between several generations, is associated to an effect inherited from a treatment and that stochastic effect can be dismissed.
Compute differentially bound sites from multiple ChIP-seq experiments using affinity (quantitative) data. Also enables occupancy (overlap) analysis and plotting functions.
Differential expression analysis of sequence count data. Implements a range of statistical methodology based on the negative binomial distributions, including empirical Bayes estimation, exact tests, generalized linear models, quasi-likelihood, and gene set enrichment. Can perform differential analyses of any type of omics data that produces read counts, including RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, Bisulfite-seq, SAGE, CAGE, metabolomics, or proteomics spectral counts. RNA-seq analyses can be conducted at the gene or isoform level, and tests can be conducted for differential exon or transcript usage.
RnBeads facilitates comprehensive analysis of various types of DNA methylation data at the genome scale.