goSTAG

GeneExpression

Gene lists derived from the results of genomic analyses are rich in biological information. For instance, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) from a microarray or RNA-Seq analysis are related functionally in terms of their response to a treatment or condition. Gene lists can vary in size, up to several thousand genes, depending on the robustness of the perturbations or how widely different the conditions are biologically. Having a way to associate biological relatedness between hundreds and thousands of genes systematically is impractical by manually curating the annotation and function of each gene. Over-representation analysis (ORA) of genes was developed to identify biological themes. Given a Gene Ontology (GO) and an annotation of genes that indicate the categories each one fits into, significance of the over-representation of the genes within the ontological categories is determined by a Fisher's exact test or modeling according to a hypergeometric distribution. Comparing a small number of enriched biological categories for a few samples is manageable using Venn diagrams or other means for assessing overlaps. However, with hundreds of enriched categories and many samples, the comparisons are laborious. Furthermore, if there are enriched categories that are shared between samples, trying to represent a common theme across them is highly subjective. goSTAG uses GO subtrees to tag and annotate genes within a set. goSTAG visualizes the similarities between the over-representation of DEGs by clustering the p-values from the enrichment statistical tests and labels clusters with the GO term that has the most paths to the root within the subtree generated from all the GO terms in the cluster.

Source attribution

  • BioconductorgoSTAG

Related resources

The package contains methods to visualise the expression profile of genes from a microarray or RNA-seq experiment, and offers a supervised clustering approach to identify GO terms containing genes with expression levels that best classify two or more predefined groups of samples. Annotations for the genes present in the expression dataset may be obtained from Ensembl through the biomaRt package, if not provided by the user. The default random forest framework is used to evaluate the capacity of each gene to cluster samples according to the factor of interest. Finally, GO terms are scored by averaging the rank (alternatively, score) of their respective gene sets to cluster the samples. P-values may be computed to assess the significance of GO term ranking. Visualisation function include gene expression profile, gene ontology-based heatmaps, and hierarchical clustering of experimental samples using gene expression data.

Data analysis, linear models and differential expression for omics data.

R package for transcriptional analysis based on transcriptograms, a method to analyze transcriptomes that projects expression values on a set of ordered proteins, arranged such that the probability that gene products participate in the same metabolic pathway exponentially decreases with the increase of the distance between two proteins of the ordering. Transcriptograms are, hence, genome wide gene expression profiles that provide a global view for the cellular metabolism, while indicating gene sets whose expressions are altered.

The development of high-throughput sequencing led to increased use of co-expression analysis to go beyong single feature (i.e. gene) focus. We propose GWENA (Gene Whole co-Expression Network Analysis) , a tool designed to perform gene co-expression network analysis and explore the results in a single pipeline. It includes functional enrichment of modules of co-expressed genes, phenotypcal association, topological analysis and comparison of networks configuration between conditions.

This package implements a variety of functions useful for gene set analysis using rotations to approximate the null distribution. It contributes with the implementation of seven test statistic scores that can be used with different goals and interpretations. Several functions are available to complement the statistical results with graphical representations.

Phantasus is a web-application for visual and interactive gene expression analysis. Phantasus is based on Morpheus – a web-based software for heatmap visualisation and analysis, which was integrated with an R environment via OpenCPU API. Aside from basic visualization and filtering methods, R-based methods such as k-means clustering, principal component analysis or differential expression analysis with limma package are supported.