EmpiricalBrownsMethod

Biological molecules in a living organism seldom work individually. They usually interact each other in a cooperative way. Biological process is too complicated to understand without considering such interactions. Thus, network-based procedures can be seen as powerful methods for studying complex process. However, many methods are devised for analyzing individual genes. It is said that techniques based on biological networks such as gene co-expression are more precise ways to represent information than those using lists of genes only. This package is aimed to integrate the gene expression and biological network. A biological network is constructed from gene expression data and it is used for Gene Set Enrichment Analysis.

MethylMix is an algorithm implemented to identify hyper and hypomethylated genes for a disease. MethylMix is based on a beta mixture model to identify methylation states and compares them with the normal DNA methylation state. MethylMix uses a novel statistic, the Differential Methylation value or DM-value defined as the difference of a methylation state with the normal methylation state. Finally, matched gene expression data is used to identify, besides differential, functional methylation states by focusing on methylation changes that effect gene expression. References: Gevaert 0. MethylMix: an R package for identifying DNA methylation-driven genes. Bioinformatics (Oxford, England). 2015;31(11):1839-41. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btv020. Gevaert O, Tibshirani R, Plevritis SK. Pancancer analysis of DNA methylation-driven genes using MethylMix. Genome Biology. 2015;16(1):17. doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0579-8.

Calculates functional similarities based on the pathways described on KEGG and REACTOME or in gene sets. These similarities can be calculated for pathways or gene sets, genes, or clusters and combined with other similarities. They can be used to improve networks, gene selection, testing relationships...

Use multiple factor analysis to calculate individualized pathway-centric scores of deviation with respect to the sampled population based on multi-omic assays (e.g., RNA-seq, copy number alterations, methylation, etc). Graphical and numerical outputs are provided to identify highly aberrant individuals for a particular pathway of interest, as well as the gene and omics drivers of aberrant multi-omic profiles.

Pathview is a tool set for pathway based data integration and visualization. It maps and renders a wide variety of biological data on relevant pathway graphs. All users need is to supply their data and specify the target pathway. Pathview automatically downloads the pathway graph data, parses the data file, maps user data to the pathway, and render pathway graph with the mapped data. In addition, Pathview also seamlessly integrates with pathway and gene set (enrichment) analysis tools for large-scale and fully automated analysis.

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.