vtpnet

CCPlotR is an R package for visualising results from tools that predict cell-cell interactions from single-cell RNA-seq data. These plots are generic and can be used to visualise results from multiple tools such as Liana, CellPhoneDB, NATMI etc.

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.

A pure data-driven gene network, weighted gene co-expression network (WGCN) could be constructed only from expression profile. Different layers in such networks may represent different time points, multiple conditions or various species. AMOUNTAIN aims to search active modules in multi-layer WGCN using a continuous optimization approach.

A simple, fast Bayesian method for computing posterior probabilities for relationships between a single predictor variable and multiple potential outcome variables, incorporating prior probabilities of relationships. In the context of knockdown experiments, the predictor variable is the knocked-down gene, while the other genes are potential targets. Can also be used for differential expression/2-class data.

Fast annotation of genomic peaks using DNA interaction data by constructing interaction networks with igraph, where peaks overlapping any node in a connected subgraph are annotated with all genes in that subgraph. The annotation evidence could be visualized as either a network graph or a genomic track integrated with gene annotation information.