gsean

This package implements the Ensemble of Gene Set Enrichment Analyses (EGSEA) method for gene set testing. EGSEA algorithm utilizes the analysis results of twelve prominent GSE algorithms in the literature to calculate collective significance scores for each gene set.

The EnrichmentBrowser package implements essential functionality for the enrichment analysis of gene expression data. The analysis combines the advantages of set-based and network-based enrichment analysis in order to derive high-confidence gene sets and biological pathways that are differentially regulated in the expression data under investigation. Besides, the package facilitates the visualization and exploration of such sets and pathways.

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.

Interactions between proteins occur in many, if not most, biological processes. Most proteins perform their functions in networks associated with other proteins and other biomolecules. This fact has motivated the development of a variety of experimental methods for the identification of protein interactions. This variety has in turn ushered in the development of numerous different computational approaches for modeling and predicting protein interactions. Sometimes an experiment is aimed at identifying proteins closely related to some interesting proteins. A network based statistical learning method is used to infer the putative functions of proteins from the known functions of its neighboring proteins on a PPI network. This package identifies such proteins often involved in the same or similar biological functions.

The GSEABenchmarkeR package implements an extendable framework for reproducible evaluation of set- and network-based methods for enrichment analysis of gene expression data. This includes support for the efficient execution of these methods on comprehensive real data compendia (microarray and RNA-seq) using parallel computation on standard workstations and institutional computer grids. Methods can then be assessed with respect to runtime, statistical significance, and relevance of the results for the phenotypes investigated.

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.