TOAST
This package is devoted to analyzing high-throughput data (e.g. gene expression microarray, DNA methylation microarray, RNA-seq) from complex tissues. Current functionalities include 1. detect cell-type specific or cross-cell type differential signals 2. tree-based differential analysis 3. improve variable selection in reference-free deconvolution 4. partial reference-free deconvolution with prior knowledge.
- Bioconductor
- https://bioconductor.org/packages/TOAST
Source attribution
- Bioconductor — TOAST
Related resources
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.
De novo identification and extraction of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) from the human genome using Whole Genome Bisulfite Sequencing (WGBS) and Illumina Infinium Array (450K and EPIC) data. Provides functionality for filtering probes possibly confounded by SNPs and cross-hybridisation. Includes GRanges generation and plotting functions.
Gene Expression Omnibus(GEO) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) provide us with a wealth of data, such as RNA-seq, DNA Methylation, SNP and Copy number variation data. It's easy to download data from TCGA using the gdc tool, but processing these data into a format suitable for bioinformatics analysis requires more work. This R package was developed to handle these data.
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.
The aim of TCGAbiolinks is : i) facilitate the GDC open-access data retrieval, ii) prepare the data using the appropriate pre-processing strategies, iii) provide the means to carry out different standard analyses and iv) to easily reproduce earlier research results. In more detail, the package provides multiple methods for analysis (e.g., differential expression analysis, identifying differentially methylated regions) and methods for visualization (e.g., survival plots, volcano plots, starburst plots) in order to easily develop complete analysis pipelines.