PathNet

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.

DEsubs is a network-based systems biology package that extracts disease-perturbed subpathways within a pathway network as recorded by RNA-seq experiments. It contains an extensive and customizable framework covering a broad range of operation modes at all stages of the subpathway analysis, enabling a case-specific approach. The operation modes refer to the pathway network construction and processing, the subpathway extraction, visualization and enrichment analysis with regard to various biological and pharmacological features. Its capabilities render it a tool-guide for both the modeler and experimentalist for the identification of more robust systems-level biomarkers for complex diseases.

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.

MIRit is an R package that provides several methods for investigating the relationships between miRNAs and genes in different biological conditions. In particular, MIRit allows to explore the functions of dysregulated miRNAs, and makes it possible to identify miRNA-gene regulatory axes that control biological pathways, thus enabling the users to unveil the complexity of miRNA biology. MIRit is an all-in-one framework that aims to help researchers in all the central aspects of an integrative miRNA-mRNA analyses, from differential expression analysis to network characterization.

This is an easy-to-use package for downloading, organizing, and integrative analyzing RNA expression data in GDC with an emphasis on deciphering the lncRNA-mRNA related ceRNA regulatory network in cancer. Three databases of lncRNA-miRNA interactions including spongeScan, starBase, and miRcode, as well as three databases of mRNA-miRNA interactions including miRTarBase, starBase, and miRcode are incorporated into the package for ceRNAs network construction. limma, edgeR, and DESeq2 can be used to identify differentially expressed genes/miRNAs. Functional enrichment analyses including GO, KEGG, and DO can be performed based on the clusterProfiler and DO packages. Both univariate CoxPH and KM survival analyses of multiple genes can be implemented in the package. Besides some routine visualization functions such as volcano plot, bar plot, and KM plot, a few simply shiny apps are developed to facilitate visualization of results on a local webpage.

A package for inferring, comparing, and visualizing gene networks from single-cell RNA sequencing data. It integrates multiple methods (GENIE3, GRNBoost2, ZILGM, PCzinb, and JRF) for robust network inference, supports consensus building across methods or datasets, and provides tools for evaluating regulatory structure and community similarity. GRNBoost2 requires Python package 'arboreto' which can be installed using init_py(install_missing = TRUE). This package includes adapted functions from ZILGM (Park et al., 2021), JRF (Petralia et al., 2015), and learn2count (Nguyen et al. 2023) packages with proper attribution under GPL-2 license.