Lheuristic

Functions to summarize DNA methylation data using regional principal components. Regional principal components are computed using principal components analysis within genomic regions to summarize the variability in methylation levels across CpGs. The number of principal components is chosen using either the Marcenko-Pasteur or Gavish-Donoho method to identify relevant signal in the data.

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.

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.

KnowYourCG (KYCG) is a supervised learning framework designed for the functional analysis of DNA methylation data. Unlike existing tools that focus on genes or genomic intervals, KnowYourCG directly targets CpG dinucleotides, featuring automated supervised screenings of diverse biological and technical influences, including sequence motifs, transcription factor binding, histone modifications, replication timing, cell-type-specific methylation, and trait-epigenome associations. KnowYourCG addresses the challenges of data sparsity in various methylation datasets, including low-pass Nanopore sequencing, single-cell DNA methylomes, 5-hydroxymethylation profiles, spatial DNA methylation maps, and array-based datasets for epigenome-wide association studies and epigenetic clocks (<doi:10.1126/sciadv.adw3027>).

ramr is an R package for detection of epimutations (i.e., infrequent aberrant DNA methylation events) in large data sets obtained by methylation profiling using array or high-throughput methylation sequencing. In addition, package provides functions to visualize found aberrantly methylated regions (AMRs), to generate sets of all possible regions to be used as reference sets for enrichment analysis, and to generate biologically relevant test data sets for performance evaluation of AMR/DMR search algorithms.

A tool to estimate the cell composition of DNA methylation whole blood sample measured on any platform technology (microarray and sequencing).