MethReg

pathwayPCA is an integrative analysis tool that implements the principal component analysis (PCA) based pathway analysis approaches described in Chen et al. (2008), Chen et al. (2010), and Chen (2011). pathwayPCA allows users to: (1) Test pathway association with binary, continuous, or survival phenotypes. (2) Extract relevant genes in the pathways using the SuperPCA and AES-PCA approaches. (3) Compute principal components (PCs) based on the selected genes. These estimated latent variables represent pathway activities for individual subjects, which can then be used to perform integrative pathway analysis, such as multi-omics analysis. (4) Extract relevant genes that drive pathway significance as well as data corresponding to these relevant genes for additional in-depth analysis. (5) Perform analyses with enhanced computational efficiency with parallel computing and enhanced data safety with S4-class data objects. (6) Analyze studies with complex experimental designs, with multiple covariates, and with interaction effects, e.g., testing whether pathway association with clinical phenotype is different between male and female subjects. Citations: Chen et al. (2008) <https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btn458>; Chen et al. (2010) <https://doi.org/10.1002/gepi.20532>; and Chen (2011) <https://doi.org/10.2202/1544-6115.1697>.

TENET identifies key transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements (REs) linked to a specific cell type by finding significantly correlated differences in gene expression and RE DNA methylation between case and control input datasets, and identifying the top genes by number of significant RE DNA methylation site links. It also includes many tools for visualization and analysis of the results, including plots displaying and comparing methylation and expression data and methylation site link counts, survival analysis, TF motif searching in the vicinity of linked RE DNA methylation sites, custom TAD and peak overlap analysis, and UCSC Genome Browser track file generation. A utility function is also provided to download methylation, expression, and patient survival data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) for use in TENET or other analyses.

Integrating an increasing number of available multi-omics cancer data remains one of the main challenges to improve our understanding of cancer. One of the main challenges is using multi-omics data for identifying novel cancer driver genes. We have developed an algorithm, called AMARETTO, that integrates copy number, DNA methylation and gene expression data to identify a set of driver genes by analyzing cancer samples and connects them to clusters of co-expressed genes, which we define as modules. We applied AMARETTO in a pancancer setting to identify cancer driver genes and their modules on multiple cancer sites. AMARETTO captures modules enriched in angiogenesis, cell cycle and EMT, and modules that accurately predict survival and molecular subtypes. This allows AMARETTO to identify novel cancer driver genes directing canonical cancer pathways.

This package provides a workflow for the use of EaSIeR tool, developed to assess patients' likelihood to respond to ICB therapies providing just the patients' RNA-seq data as input. We integrate RNA-seq data with different types of prior knowledge to extract quantitative descriptors of the tumor microenvironment from several points of view, including composition of the immune repertoire, and activity of intra- and extra-cellular communications. Then, we use multi-task machine learning trained in TCGA data to identify how these descriptors can simultaneously predict several state-of-the-art hallmarks of anti-cancer immune response. In this way we derive cancer-specific models and identify cancer-specific systems biomarkers of immune response. These biomarkers have been experimentally validated in the literature and the performance of EaSIeR predictions has been validated using independent datasets form four different cancer types with patients treated with anti-PD1 or anti-PDL1 therapy.

Differential expression analysis of sequence count data. Implements a range of statistical methodology based on the negative binomial distributions, including empirical Bayes estimation, exact tests, generalized linear models, quasi-likelihood, and gene set enrichment. Can perform differential analyses of any type of omics data that produces read counts, including RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, Bisulfite-seq, SAGE, CAGE, metabolomics, or proteomics spectral counts. RNA-seq analyses can be conducted at the gene or isoform level, and tests can be conducted for differential exon or transcript usage.

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.