MBAmethyl

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.

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.

Interactive tool for visualizing Illumina methylation array data. Both the 450k and EPIC array are supported.

This package contains a set of processing and plotting methods for performing copy-number variation (CNV) analysis using Illumina 450k or EPIC methylation arrays.

mitch is an R package for multi-contrast enrichment analysis. At it’s heart, it uses a rank-MANOVA based statistical approach to detect sets of genes that exhibit enrichment in the multidimensional space as compared to the background. The rank-MANOVA concept dates to work by Cox and Mann (https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-13-S16-S12). mitch is useful for pathway analysis of profiling studies with one, two or more contrasts, or in studies with multiple omics profiling, for example proteomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic analysis of the same samples. mitch is perfectly suited for pathway level differential analysis of scRNA-seq data. We have an established routine for pathway enrichment of Infinium Methylation Array data (see vignette). The main strengths of mitch are that it can import datasets easily from many upstream tools and has advanced plotting features to visualise these enrichments.

Machine learning-based tools to predict DNA methylation of locus-specific repetitive elements (RE) by learning surrounding genetic and epigenetic information. These tools provide genomewide and single-base resolution of DNA methylation prediction on RE that are difficult to measure using array-based or sequencing-based platforms, which enables epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) and differentially methylated region (DMR) analysis on RE.