decoupleR

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.

The package clusters gene activity along chromosome into zones, detects differential zones as outstanding, and visualizes maps of outstanding zones across the genome. It enables characterization of effects on multiple genes within adaptive genomic neighborhoods, which could arise from genome reorganization, structural variation, or epigenome alteration. It guarantees cluster optimality, linear runtime to sample size, and reproducibility. One can apply it on genome-wide activity measurements such as copy number, transcriptomic, proteomic, and methylation data.

Integrating an increasing number of available multi-omics cancer data remains one of the main challenges to improve our understanding of cancer. One of the main challenges is using multi-omics data for identifying novel cancer driver genes. We have developed an algorithm, called AMARETTO, that integrates copy number, DNA methylation and gene expression data to identify a set of driver genes by analyzing cancer samples and connects them to clusters of co-expressed genes, which we define as modules. We applied AMARETTO in a pancancer setting to identify cancer driver genes and their modules on multiple cancer sites. AMARETTO captures modules enriched in angiogenesis, cell cycle and EMT, and modules that accurately predict survival and molecular subtypes. This allows AMARETTO to identify novel cancer driver genes directing canonical cancer pathways.

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.

RNA degradation is monitored through measurement of RNA abundance after inhibiting RNA synthesis. This package has functions and example scripts to facilitate (1) data normalization, (2) data modeling using constant decay rate or time-dependent decay rate models, (3) the evaluation of treatment or genotype effects, and (4) plotting of the data and models. Data Normalization: functions and scripts make easy the normalization to the initial (T0) RNA abundance, as well as a method to correct for artificial inflation of Reads per Million (RPM) abundance in global assessments as the total size of the RNA pool decreases. Modeling: Normalized data is then modeled using maximum likelihood to fit parameters. For making treatment or genotype comparisons (up to four), the modeling step models all possible treatment effects on each gene by repeating the modeling with constraints on the model parameters (i.e., the decay rate of treatments A and B are modeled once with them being equal and again allowing them to both vary independently). Model Selection: The AICc value is calculated for each model, and the model with the lowest AICc is chosen. Modeling results of selected models are then compiled into a single data frame. Graphical Plotting: functions are provided to easily visualize decay data model, or half-life distributions using ggplot2 package functions.

distinct is a statistical method to perform differential testing between two or more groups of distributions; differential testing is performed via hierarchical non-parametric permutation tests on the cumulative distribution functions (cdfs) of each sample. While most methods for differential expression target differences in the mean abundance between conditions, distinct, by comparing full cdfs, identifies, both, differential patterns involving changes in the mean, as well as more subtle variations that do not involve the mean (e.g., unimodal vs. bi-modal distributions with the same mean). distinct is a general and flexible tool: due to its fully non-parametric nature, which makes no assumptions on how the data was generated, it can be applied to a variety of datasets. It is particularly suitable to perform differential state analyses on single cell data (i.e., differential analyses within sub-populations of cells), such as single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and high-dimensional flow or mass cytometry (HDCyto) data. To use distinct one needs data from two or more groups of samples (i.e., experimental conditions), with at least 2 samples (i.e., biological replicates) per group.