miRSM

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.

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.

Genetic variants associated with diseases often affect non-coding regions, thus likely having a regulatory role. To understand the effects of genetic variants in these regulatory regions, identifying genes that are modulated by specific regulatory elements (REs) is crucial. The effect of gene regulatory elements, such as enhancers, is often cell-type specific, likely because the combinations of transcription factors (TFs) that are regulating a given enhancer have cell-type specific activity. This TF activity can be quantified with existing tools such as diffTF and captures differences in binding of a TF in open chromatin regions. Collectively, this forms a gene regulatory network (GRN) with cell-type and data-specific TF-RE and RE-gene links. Here, we reconstruct such a GRN using single-cell or bulk RNAseq and open chromatin (e.g., using ATACseq or ChIPseq for open chromatin marks) and optionally (Capture) Hi-C data. Our network contains different types of links, connecting TFs to regulatory elements, the latter of which is connected to genes in the vicinity or within the same chromatin domain (TAD). We use a statistical framework to assign empirical FDRs and weights to all links using a permutation-based approach.

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.

This package implements inferential methods to compare gene lists in terms of their biological meaning as expressed in the GO. The compared gene lists are characterized by cross-tabulation frequency tables of enriched GO items. Dissimilarity between gene lists is evaluated using the Sorensen-Dice index. The fundamental guiding principle is that two gene lists are taken as similar if they share a great proportion of common enriched GO items.

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.