Damsel

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.

Tool for analysis of codon usage in various unannotated or KEGG/COG annotated DNA sequences. Calculates different measures of CU bias and CU-based predictors of gene expressivity, and performs gene set enrichment analysis for annotated sequences. Implements several methods for visualization of CU and enrichment analysis results.

pathwayPCA is an integrative analysis tool that implements the principal component analysis (PCA) based pathway analysis approaches described in Chen et al. (2008), Chen et al. (2010), and Chen (2011). pathwayPCA allows users to: (1) Test pathway association with binary, continuous, or survival phenotypes. (2) Extract relevant genes in the pathways using the SuperPCA and AES-PCA approaches. (3) Compute principal components (PCs) based on the selected genes. These estimated latent variables represent pathway activities for individual subjects, which can then be used to perform integrative pathway analysis, such as multi-omics analysis. (4) Extract relevant genes that drive pathway significance as well as data corresponding to these relevant genes for additional in-depth analysis. (5) Perform analyses with enhanced computational efficiency with parallel computing and enhanced data safety with S4-class data objects. (6) Analyze studies with complex experimental designs, with multiple covariates, and with interaction effects, e.g., testing whether pathway association with clinical phenotype is different between male and female subjects. Citations: Chen et al. (2008) <https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btn458>; Chen et al. (2010) <https://doi.org/10.1002/gepi.20532>; and Chen (2011) <https://doi.org/10.2202/1544-6115.1697>.

This package predicts a drug’s primary target(s) or secondary target(s) by integrating large-scale genetic and drug screens from the Cancer Dependency Map project run by the Broad Institute. It further investigates whether the drug specifically targets the wild-type or mutated target forms. To show how to use this package in practice, we provided sample data along with step-by-step example.

Normalisation, testing for differential variability and differential methylation and gene set testing for data from Illumina's Infinium HumanMethylation arrays. The normalisation procedure is subset-quantile within-array normalisation (SWAN), which allows Infinium I and II type probes on a single array to be normalised together. The test for differential variability is based on an empirical Bayes version of Levene's test. Differential methylation testing is performed using RUV, which can adjust for systematic errors of unknown origin in high-dimensional data by using negative control probes. Gene ontology analysis is performed by taking into account the number of probes per gene on the array, as well as taking into account multi-gene associated probes.

The main functions for methylGSA are methylglm and methylRRA. methylGSA implements logistic regression adjusting number of probes as a covariate. methylRRA adjusts multiple p-values of each gene by Robust Rank Aggregation. For more detailed help information, please see the vignette.