Human blood gene signature as a marker for smoking exposure: computational approaches of the top ranked teams in the sbv IMPROVER Systems Toxicology challenge

Crowdsourcing assessment of maternal blood multi-omics for predicting gestational age and preterm birth

Identification of pregnancies at risk of preterm birth (PTB), the leading cause of newborn deaths, remains challenging given the syndromic nature of the disease. We report a longitudinal multi-omics study coupled with a DREAM challenge to develop predictive models of PTB. The findings indicate that whole-blood gene expression predicts ultrasound-based gestational ages in normal and complicated pregnancies (r = 0.83) and, using data collected before 37 weeks of gestation, also predicts the delivery date in both normal pregnancies (r = 0.86) and those with spontaneous preterm birth (r = 0.75). Based on samples collected before 33 weeks in asymptomatic women, our analysis suggests that expression changes preceding preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes are consistent across time points and cohorts and involve leukocyte-mediated immunity. Models built from plasma proteomic data predict spontaneous preterm delivery with intact membranes with higher accuracy and earlier in pregnancy than transcriptomic models (AUROC = 0.76 versus AUROC = 0.6 at 27-33 weeks of gestation).

Ensemble of rankers for efficient gene signature extraction in smoke exposure classification

Background

System toxicology aims at understanding the mechanisms used by biological systems to respond to toxicants. Such understanding can be leveraged to assess the risk of chemicals, drugs, and consumer products in living organisms. In system toxicology, machine learning techniques and methodologies are applied to develop prediction models for classification of toxicant exposure of biological systems. Gene expression data (RNA/DNA microarray) are often used to develop such prediction models.

Results

The outcome of the present work is an experimental methodology to develop prediction models, based on robust gene signatures, for the classification of cigarette smoke exposure and cessation in humans. It is a result of the participation in the recent sbv IMPROVER SysTox Computational Challenge. By merging different gene selection techniques, we obtain robust gene signatures and we investigate prediction capabilities of different off-the-shelf machine learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks, linear models and support vector machines. We also predict six novel genes in our signature, and firmly believe these genes have to be further investigated as biomarkers for tobacco smoking exposure.

Conclusions

The proposed methodology provides gene signatures with top-ranked performances in the prediction of the investigated classification methods, as well as new discoveries in genetic signatures for bio-markers of the smoke exposure of humans.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-018-2035-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.