Bridging heterogeneous mutation data to enhance disease gene discovery

PheSeq, a Bayesian deep learning model to enhance and interpret the gene-disease association studies

Despite the abundance of genotype-phenotype association studies, the resulting association outcomes often lack robustness and interpretations. To address these challenges, we introduce PheSeq, a Bayesian deep learning model that enhances and interprets association studies through the integration and perception of phenotype descriptions. By implementing the PheSeq model in three case studies on Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, and lung cancer, we identify 1024 priority genes for Alzheimer's disease and 818 and 566 genes for breast cancer and lung cancer, respectively. Benefiting from data fusion, these findings represent moderate positive rates, high recall rates, and interpretation in gene-disease association studies.

MGREL: A multi-graph representation learning-based ensemble learning method for gene-disease association prediction

The identification of gene-disease associations plays an important role in the exploration of pathogenic mechanisms and therapeutic targets. Computational methods have been regarded as an effective way to discover the potential gene-disease associations in recent years. However, most of them ignored the combination of abundant genetic, therapeutic information, and gene-disease network topology. To this end, we re-organized the current gene-disease association benchmark dataset by extracting the newest gene-disease associations from the OMIM database. Then, we developed a multi-graph representation learning-based ensemble model, named MGREL to predict gene-disease associations. MGREL integrated two feature generation channels to extract gene and disease features, including a knowledge extraction channel which learned high-order representations from genetic and therapeutic information, and a graph learning channel which acquired network topological representations through multiple advanced graph representation learning methods. Then, an ensemble learning method with 5 machine learning models was used as the classifier to predict the gene-disease association. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated the significant performance achieved by MGREL compared to 5 state-of-the-art methods. For the major measurements (AUC = 0.925, AUPR = 0.935), the relative improvements of MGREL compared to the suboptimal methods are 3.24%, and 2.75%, respectively. MGREL also achieved impressive improvements in the challenging tasks of predicting potential associations for unknown genes/diseases. In addition, case studies implied potential applications for MGREL in the discovery of potential therapeutic targets.

LitCovid-AGAC: cellular and molecular level annotation data set based on COVID-19

Currently, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) literature has been increasing dramatically, and the increased text amount make it possible to perform large scale text mining and knowledge discovery. Therefore, curation of these texts becomes a crucial issue for Bio-medical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) community, so as to retrieve the important information about the mechanism of COVID-19. PubAnnotation is an aligned annotation system which provides an efficient platform for biological curators to upload their annotations or merge other external annotations. Inspired by the integration among multiple useful COVID-19 annotations, we merged three annotations resources to LitCovid data set, and constructed a cross-annotated corpus, LitCovid-AGAC. This corpus consists of 12 labels including Mutation, Species, Gene, Disease from PubTator, GO, CHEBI from OGER, Var, MPA, CPA, NegReg, PosReg, Reg from AGAC, upon 50,018 COVID-19 abstracts in LitCovid. Contain sufficient abundant information being possible to unveil the hidden knowledge in the pathological mechanism of COVID-19.