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Wei PJ, Bao JJ, Gao Z, Tan JY, Cao RF, Su Y, Zheng CH, Deng L. MEFFGRN: Matrix enhancement and feature fusion-based method for reconstructing the gene regulatory network of epithelioma papulosum cyprini cells by spring viremia of carp virus infection. Comput Biol Med 2024; 179:108835. [PMID: 38996550 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.108835] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2024] [Revised: 06/05/2024] [Accepted: 06/29/2024] [Indexed: 07/14/2024]
Abstract
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are crucial for understanding organismal molecular mechanisms and processes. Construction of GRN in the epithelioma papulosum cyprini (EPC) cells of cyprinid fish by spring viremia of carp virus (SVCV) infection helps understand the immune regulatory mechanisms that enhance the survival capabilities of cyprinid fish. Although many computational methods have been used to infer GRNs, specialized approaches for predicting the GRN of EPC cells following SVCV infection are lacking. In addition, most existing methods focus primarily on gene expression features, neglecting the valuable network structural information in known GRNs. In this study, we propose a novel supervised deep neural network, named MEFFGRN (Matrix Enhancement- and Feature Fusion-based method for Gene Regulatory Network inference), to accurately predict the GRN of EPC cells following SVCV infection. MEFFGRN considers both gene expression data and network structure information of known GRN and introduces a matrix enhancement method to address the sparsity issue of known GRN, extracting richer network structure information. To optimize the benefits of CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) in image processing, gene expression and enhanced GRN data were transformed into histogram images for each gene pair respectively. Subsequently, these histograms were separately fed into CNNs for training to obtain the corresponding gene expression and network structural features. Furthermore, a feature fusion mechanism was introduced to comprehensively integrate the gene expression and network structural features. This integration considers the specificity of each feature and their interactive information, resulting in a more comprehensive and precise feature representation during the fusion process. Experimental results from both real-world and benchmark datasets demonstrate that MEFFGRN achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art computational methods. Furthermore, study findings from SVCV-infected EPC cells suggest that MEFFGRN can predict novel gene regulatory relationships.
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Affiliation(s)
- Pi-Jing Wei
- Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, Institutes of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University, 111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China
| | - Jin-Jin Bao
- Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, 111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China
| | - Zhen Gao
- Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, 111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China
| | - Jing-Yun Tan
- Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Microbial Genetic Engineering, College of Life Sciences and Oceanology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China
| | - Rui-Fen Cao
- Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, 111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China
| | - Yansen Su
- School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, 111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China
| | - Chun-Hou Zheng
- School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, 111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China.
| | - Li Deng
- Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Microbial Genetic Engineering, College of Life Sciences and Oceanology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China.
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Wang Y, Zhou F, Guan J. SFINN: inferring gene regulatory network from single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data with shared factor neighborhood and integrated neural network. BIOINFORMATICS (OXFORD, ENGLAND) 2024; 40:btae433. [PMID: 38950180 PMCID: PMC11236097 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae433] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/06/2024] [Revised: 06/18/2024] [Accepted: 06/28/2024] [Indexed: 07/03/2024]
Abstract
MOTIVATION The rise of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology presents new opportunities for constructing detailed cell type-specific gene regulatory networks (GRNs) to study cell heterogeneity. However, challenges caused by noises, technical errors, and dropout phenomena in scRNA-seq data pose significant obstacles to GRN inference, making the design of accurate GRN inference algorithms still essential. The recent growth of both single-cell and spatial transcriptomic sequencing data enables the development of supervised deep learning methods to infer GRNs on these diverse single-cell datasets. RESULTS In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning framework based on shared factor neighborhood and integrated neural network (SFINN) for inferring potential interactions and causalities between transcription factors and target genes from single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data. SFINN utilizes shared factor neighborhood to construct cellular neighborhood network based on gene expression data and additionally integrates cellular network generated from spatial location information. Subsequently, the cell adjacency matrix and gene pair expression are fed into an integrated neural network framework consisting of a graph convolutional neural network and a fully-connected neural network to determine whether the genes interact. Performance evaluation in the tasks of gene interaction and causality prediction against the existing GRN reconstruction algorithms demonstrates the usability and competitiveness of SFINN across different kinds of data. SFINN can be applied to infer GRNs from conventional single-cell sequencing data and spatial transcriptomic data. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION SFINN can be accessed at GitHub: https://github.com/JGuan-lab/SFINN.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yongjie Wang
- Department of Automation, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian 361102, China
| | - Fengfan Zhou
- Department of Automation, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian 361102, China
| | - Jinting Guan
- Department of Automation, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian 361102, China
- Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education, Shanghai 200240, China
- National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian 361102, China
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Zhou X, Pan J, Chen L, Zhang S, Chen Y. DeepIMAGER: Deeply Analyzing Gene Regulatory Networks from scRNA-seq Data. Biomolecules 2024; 14:766. [PMID: 39062480 PMCID: PMC11274664 DOI: 10.3390/biom14070766] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/11/2024] [Revised: 06/22/2024] [Accepted: 06/25/2024] [Indexed: 07/28/2024] Open
Abstract
Understanding the dynamics of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) across diverse cell types poses a challenge yet holds immense value in unraveling the molecular mechanisms governing cellular processes. Current computational methods, which rely solely on expression changes from bulk RNA-seq and/or scRNA-seq data, often result in high rates of false positives and low precision. Here, we introduce an advanced computational tool, DeepIMAGER, for inferring cell-specific GRNs through deep learning and data integration. DeepIMAGER employs a supervised approach that transforms the co-expression patterns of gene pairs into image-like representations and leverages transcription factor (TF) binding information for model training. It is trained using comprehensive datasets that encompass scRNA-seq profiles and ChIP-seq data, capturing TF-gene pair information across various cell types. Comprehensive validations on six cell lines show DeepIMAGER exhibits superior performance in ten popular GRN inference tools and has remarkable robustness against dropout-zero events. DeepIMAGER was applied to scRNA-seq datasets of multiple myeloma (MM) and detected potential GRNs for TFs of RORC, MITF, and FOXD2 in MM dendritic cells. This technical innovation, combined with its capability to accurately decode GRNs from scRNA-seq, establishes DeepIMAGER as a valuable tool for unraveling complex regulatory networks in various cell types.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiguo Zhou
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China; (X.Z.); (J.P.); (L.C.)
| | - Jingyi Pan
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China; (X.Z.); (J.P.); (L.C.)
| | - Liang Chen
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China; (X.Z.); (J.P.); (L.C.)
| | - Shaoqiang Zhang
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China; (X.Z.); (J.P.); (L.C.)
| | - Yong Chen
- Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ 08028, USA
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Lei Y, Huang XT, Guo X, Hang Katie Chan K, Gao L. DeepGRNCS: deep learning-based framework for jointly inferring gene regulatory networks across cell subpopulations. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae334. [PMID: 38980373 PMCID: PMC11232306 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae334] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/11/2024] [Revised: 06/03/2024] [Accepted: 07/01/2024] [Indexed: 07/10/2024] Open
Abstract
Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) allows us to obtain a deeper understanding of cellular function and disease pathogenesis. Recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology have improved the accuracy of GRN inference. However, many methods for inferring individual GRNs from scRNA-seq data are limited because they overlook intercellular heterogeneity and similarities between different cell subpopulations, which are often present in the data. Here, we propose a deep learning-based framework, DeepGRNCS, for jointly inferring GRNs across cell subpopulations. We follow the commonly accepted hypothesis that the expression of a target gene can be predicted based on the expression of transcription factors (TFs) due to underlying regulatory relationships. We initially processed scRNA-seq data by discretizing data scattering using the equal-width method. Then, we trained deep learning models to predict target gene expression from TFs. By individually removing each TF from the expression matrix, we used pre-trained deep model predictions to infer regulatory relationships between TFs and genes, thereby constructing the GRN. Our method outperforms existing GRN inference methods for various simulated and real scRNA-seq datasets. Finally, we applied DeepGRNCS to non-small cell lung cancer scRNA-seq data to identify key genes in each cell subpopulation and analyzed their biological relevance. In conclusion, DeepGRNCS effectively predicts cell subpopulation-specific GRNs. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nastume777/DeepGRNCS.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yahui Lei
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, Shaanxi, China
| | - Xiao-Tai Huang
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, Shaanxi, China
| | - Xingli Guo
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, Shaanxi, China
| | - Kei Hang Katie Chan
- Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Department of Epidemiology and Center for Global Cardiometabolic Health, Brown University, Providence, RI, United States
| | - Lin Gao
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, Shaanxi, China
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Zinati Y, Takiddeen A, Emad A. GRouNdGAN: GRN-guided simulation of single-cell RNA-seq data using causal generative adversarial networks. Nat Commun 2024; 15:4055. [PMID: 38744843 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48516-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/31/2023] [Accepted: 05/01/2024] [Indexed: 05/16/2024] Open
Abstract
We introduce GRouNdGAN, a gene regulatory network (GRN)-guided reference-based causal implicit generative model for simulating single-cell RNA-seq data, in silico perturbation experiments, and benchmarking GRN inference methods. Through the imposition of a user-defined GRN in its architecture, GRouNdGAN simulates steady-state and transient-state single-cell datasets where genes are causally expressed under the control of their regulating transcription factors (TFs). Training on six experimental reference datasets, we show that our model captures non-linear TF-gene dependencies and preserves gene identities, cell trajectories, pseudo-time ordering, and technical and biological noise, with no user manipulation and only implicit parameterization. GRouNdGAN can synthesize cells under new conditions to perform in silico TF knockout experiments. Benchmarking various GRN inference algorithms reveals that GRouNdGAN effectively bridges the existing gap between simulated and biological data benchmarks of GRN inference algorithms, providing gold standard ground truth GRNs and realistic cells corresponding to the biological system of interest.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yazdan Zinati
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Abdulrahman Takiddeen
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
| | - Amin Emad
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
- Mila, Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, QC, Canada.
- The Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute, Montreal, QC, Canada.
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Wang Y, Chen X, Zheng Z, Huang L, Xie W, Wang F, Zhang Z, Wong KC. scGREAT: Transformer-based deep-language model for gene regulatory network inference from single-cell transcriptomics. iScience 2024; 27:109352. [PMID: 38510148 PMCID: PMC10951644 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109352] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/01/2023] [Revised: 12/29/2023] [Accepted: 02/23/2024] [Indexed: 03/22/2024] Open
Abstract
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) involve complex and multi-layer regulatory interactions between regulators and their target genes. Precise knowledge of GRNs is important in understanding cellular processes and molecular functions. Recent breakthroughs in single-cell sequencing technology made it possible to infer GRNs at single-cell level. Existing methods, however, are limited by expensive computations, and sometimes simplistic assumptions. To overcome these obstacles, we propose scGREAT, a framework to infer GRN using gene embeddings and transformer from single-cell transcriptomics. scGREAT starts by constructing gene expression and gene biotext dictionaries from scRNA-seq data and gene text information. The representation of TF gene pairs is learned through optimizing embedding space by transformer-based engine. Results illustrated scGREAT outperformed other contemporary methods on benchmarks. Besides, gene representations from scGREAT provide valuable gene regulation insights, and external validation on spatial transcriptomics illuminated the mechanism behind scGREAT annotation. Moreover, scGREAT identified several TF target regulations corroborated in studies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuchen Wang
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
| | - Xingjian Chen
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
- Cutaneous Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Zetian Zheng
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
| | - Lei Huang
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
| | - Weidun Xie
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
| | - Fuzhou Wang
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
| | - Zhaolei Zhang
- Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
- Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
- Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
| | - Ka-Chun Wong
- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR
- Shenzhen Research Institute, City University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China
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7
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Malekpour SA, Haghverdi L, Sadeghi M. Single-cell multi-omics analysis identifies context-specific gene regulatory gates and mechanisms. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae180. [PMID: 38653489 PMCID: PMC11036345 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae180] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/19/2023] [Revised: 01/29/2024] [Accepted: 04/02/2024] [Indexed: 04/25/2024] Open
Abstract
There is a growing interest in inferring context specific gene regulatory networks from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. This involves identifying the regulatory relationships between transcription factors (TFs) and genes in individual cells, and then characterizing these relationships at the level of specific cell types or cell states. In this study, we introduce scGATE (single-cell gene regulatory gate) as a novel computational tool for inferring TF-gene interaction networks and reconstructing Boolean logic gates involving regulatory TFs using scRNA-seq data. In contrast to current Boolean models, scGATE eliminates the need for individual formulations and likelihood calculations for each Boolean rule (e.g. AND, OR, XOR). By employing a Bayesian framework, scGATE infers the Boolean rule after fitting the model to the data, resulting in significant reductions in time-complexities for logic-based studies. We have applied assay for transposase-accessible chromatin with sequencing (scATAC-seq) data and TF DNA binding motifs to filter out non-relevant TFs in gene regulations. By integrating single-cell clustering with these external cues, scGATE is able to infer context specific networks. The performance of scGATE is evaluated using synthetic and real single-cell multi-omics data from mouse tissues and human blood, demonstrating its superiority over existing tools for reconstructing TF-gene networks. Additionally, scGATE provides a flexible framework for understanding the complex combinatorial and cooperative relationships among TFs regulating target genes by inferring Boolean logic gates among them.
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Affiliation(s)
- Seyed Amir Malekpour
- School of Biological Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), 19395-5746, Tehran, Iran
| | - Laleh Haghverdi
- Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology, Max Delbrück Center (BIMSB-MDC) in the Helmholtz Association, Berlin, Germany
| | - Mehdi Sadeghi
- Department of Medical Genetics, National Institute of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, 1497716316, Tehran, Iran
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Wu Z, Sinha S. SPREd: a simulation-supervised neural network tool for gene regulatory network reconstruction. BIOINFORMATICS ADVANCES 2024; 4:vbae011. [PMID: 38444538 PMCID: PMC10913396 DOI: 10.1093/bioadv/vbae011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/21/2023] [Revised: 11/08/2023] [Accepted: 01/18/2024] [Indexed: 03/07/2024]
Abstract
Summary Reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from expression data is a significant open problem. Common approaches train a machine learning (ML) model to predict a gene's expression using transcription factors' (TFs') expression as features and designate important features/TFs as regulators of the gene. Here, we present an entirely different paradigm, where GRN edges are directly predicted by the ML model. The new approach, named "SPREd," is a simulation-supervised neural network for GRN inference. Its inputs comprise expression relationships (e.g. correlation, mutual information) between the target gene and each TF and between pairs of TFs. The output includes binary labels indicating whether each TF regulates the target gene. We train the neural network model using synthetic expression data generated by a biophysics-inspired simulation model that incorporates linear as well as non-linear TF-gene relationships and diverse GRN configurations. We show SPREd to outperform state-of-the-art GRN reconstruction tools GENIE3, ENNET, PORTIA, and TIGRESS on synthetic datasets with high co-expression among TFs, similar to that seen in real data. A key advantage of the new approach is its robustness to relatively small numbers of conditions (columns) in the expression matrix, which is a common problem faced by existing methods. Finally, we evaluate SPREd on real data sets in yeast that represent gold-standard benchmarks of GRN reconstruction and show it to perform significantly better than or comparably to existing methods. In addition to its high accuracy and speed, SPREd marks a first step toward incorporating biophysics principles of gene regulation into ML-based approaches to GRN reconstruction. Availability and implementation Data and code are available from https://github.com/iiiime/SPREd.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zijun Wu
- Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, United States
| | - Saurabh Sinha
- Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, United States
- H. Milton Steward School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, United States
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Li S, Liu Y, Shen LC, Yan H, Song J, Yu DJ. GMFGRN: a matrix factorization and graph neural network approach for gene regulatory network inference. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbad529. [PMID: 38261340 PMCID: PMC10805180 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad529] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/29/2023] [Revised: 12/08/2023] [Accepted: 12/19/2023] [Indexed: 01/24/2024] Open
Abstract
The recent advances of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have enabled reliable profiling of gene expression at the single-cell level, providing opportunities for accurate inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) on scRNA-seq data. Most methods for inferring GRNs suffer from the inability to eliminate transitive interactions or necessitate expensive computational resources. To address these, we present a novel method, termed GMFGRN, for accurate graph neural network (GNN)-based GRN inference from scRNA-seq data. GMFGRN employs GNN for matrix factorization and learns representative embeddings for genes. For transcription factor-gene pairs, it utilizes the learned embeddings to determine whether they interact with each other. The extensive suite of benchmarking experiments encompassing eight static scRNA-seq datasets alongside several state-of-the-art methods demonstrated mean improvements of 1.9 and 2.5% over the runner-up in area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC). In addition, across four time-series datasets, maximum enhancements of 2.4 and 1.3% in AUROC and AUPRC were observed in comparison to the runner-up. Moreover, GMFGRN requires significantly less training time and memory consumption, with time and memory consumed <10% compared to the second-best method. These findings underscore the substantial potential of GMFGRN in the inference of GRNs. It is publicly available at https://github.com/Lishuoyy/GMFGRN.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shuo Li
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 200 Xiaolingwei, Nanjing, 210094, China
| | - Yan Liu
- School of information Engineering, Yangzhou University, 196 West Huayang, Yangzhou, 225000, China
| | - Long-Chen Shen
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 200 Xiaolingwei, Nanjing, 210094, China
| | - He Yan
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 200 Xiaolingwei, Nanjing, 210094, China
| | - Jiangning Song
- Biomedicine Discovery Institute and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria 3800, Australia
- Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria 3800, Australia
| | - Dong-Jun Yu
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 200 Xiaolingwei, Nanjing, 210094, China
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Xin J, Wang M, Qu L, Chen Q, Wang W, Wang Z. BIC-LP: A Hybrid Higher-Order Dynamic Bayesian Network Score Function for Gene Regulatory Network Reconstruction. IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AND BIOINFORMATICS 2024; 21:188-199. [PMID: 38127613 DOI: 10.1109/tcbb.2023.3345317] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/23/2023]
Abstract
Reconstructing gene regulatory networks(GRNs) is an increasingly hot topic in bioinformatics. Dynamic Bayesian network(DBN) is a stochastic graph model commonly used as a vital model for GRN reconstruction. But probabilistic characteristics of biological networks and the existence of data noise bring great challenges to GRN reconstruction and always lead to many false positive/negative edges. ScoreLasso is a hybrid DBN score function combining DBN and linear regression with good performance. Its performance is, however, limited by first-order assumption and ignorance of the initial network of DBN. In this article, an integrated model based on higher-order DBN model, higher-order Lasso linear regression model and Pearson correlation model is proposed. Based on this, a hybrid higher-order DBN score function for GRN reconstruction is proposed, namely BIC-LP. BIC-LP score function is constructed by adding terms based on Lasso linear regression coefficients and Pearson correlation coefficients on classical BIC score function. Therefore, it could capture more information from dataset and curb information loss, compared with both many existing Bayesian family score functions and many state-of-the-art methods for GRN reconstruction. Experimental results show that BIC-LP can reasonably eliminate some false positive edges while retaining most true positive edges, so as to achieve better GRN reconstruction performance.
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Song J, Zaidi SAA, He L, Zhang S, Zhou G. Integrative Analysis of Machine Learning and Molecule Docking Simulations for Ischemic Stroke Diagnosis and Therapy. Molecules 2023; 28:7704. [PMID: 38067435 PMCID: PMC10707570 DOI: 10.3390/molecules28237704] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/09/2023] [Revised: 11/13/2023] [Accepted: 11/17/2023] [Indexed: 12/18/2023] Open
Abstract
Due to the narrow therapeutic window and high mortality of ischemic stroke, it is of great significance to investigate its diagnosis and therapy. We employed weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA) to ascertain gene modules related to stroke and used the maSigPro R package to seek the time-dependent genes in the progression of stroke. Three machine learning algorithms were further employed to identify the feature genes of stroke. A nomogram model was built and applied to evaluate the stroke patients. We analyzed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data to discern microglia subclusters in ischemic stroke. The RNA velocity, pseudo time, and gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) were performed to investigate the relationship of microglia subclusters. Connectivity map (CMap) analysis and molecule docking were used to screen a therapeutic agent for stroke. A nomogram model based on the feature genes showed a clinical net benefit and enabled an accurate evaluation of stroke patients. The RNA velocity and pseudo time analysis showed that microglia subcluster 0 would develop toward subcluster 2 within 24 h from stroke onset. The GSEA showed that the function of microglia subcluster 0 was opposite to that of subcluster 2. AZ_628, which screened from CMap analysis, was found to have lower binding energy with Mmp12, Lgals3, Fam20c, Capg, Pkm2, Sdc4, and Itga5 in microglia subcluster 2 and maybe a therapeutic agent for the poor development of microglia subcluster 2 after stroke. Our study presents a nomogram model for stroke diagnosis and provides a potential molecule agent for stroke therapy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jingwei Song
- Department of Medical Cell Biology and Genetics, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Genomic Stability and Disease Prevention, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, and Shenzhen Engineering Laboratory of Regenerative Technologies for Orthopaedic Diseases, Health Sciences Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China; (J.S.); (S.A.A.Z.); (L.H.)
| | - Syed Aqib Ali Zaidi
- Department of Medical Cell Biology and Genetics, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Genomic Stability and Disease Prevention, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, and Shenzhen Engineering Laboratory of Regenerative Technologies for Orthopaedic Diseases, Health Sciences Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China; (J.S.); (S.A.A.Z.); (L.H.)
| | - Liangge He
- Department of Medical Cell Biology and Genetics, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Genomic Stability and Disease Prevention, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, and Shenzhen Engineering Laboratory of Regenerative Technologies for Orthopaedic Diseases, Health Sciences Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China; (J.S.); (S.A.A.Z.); (L.H.)
| | - Shuai Zhang
- Brain Research Centre, Department of Biology, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
| | - Guangqian Zhou
- Department of Medical Cell Biology and Genetics, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Genomic Stability and Disease Prevention, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, and Shenzhen Engineering Laboratory of Regenerative Technologies for Orthopaedic Diseases, Health Sciences Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China; (J.S.); (S.A.A.Z.); (L.H.)
- Lungene Biotech Ltd., Shenzhen 518060, China
- Senotherapeutics Ltd., Hangzhou 311100, China
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12
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Wu Z, Sinha S. SPREd: A simulation-supervised neural network tool for gene regulatory network reconstruction. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.11.09.566399. [PMID: 38014297 PMCID: PMC10680606 DOI: 10.1101/2023.11.09.566399] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2023]
Abstract
Reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from expression data is a significant open problem. Common approaches train a machine learning (ML) model to predict a gene's expression using transcription factors' (TFs') expression as features and designate important features/TFs as regulators of the gene. Here, we present an entirely different paradigm, where GRN edges are directly predicted by the ML model. The new approach, named "SPREd" is a simulation-supervised neural network for GRN inference. Its inputs comprise expression relationships (e.g., correlation, mutual information) between the target gene and each TF and between pairs of TFs. The output includes binary labels indicating whether each TF regulates the target gene. We train the neural network model using synthetic expression data generated by a biophysics-inspired simulation model that incorporates linear as well as non-linear TF-gene relationships and diverse GRN configurations. We show SPREd to outperform state-of-the-art GRN reconstruction tools GENIE3, ENNET, PORTIA and TIGRESS on synthetic datasets with high co-expression among TFs, similar to that seen in real data. A key advantage of the new approach is its robustness to relatively small numbers of conditions (columns) in the expression matrix, which is a common problem faced by existing methods. Finally, we evaluate SPREd on real data sets in yeast that represent gold standard benchmarks of GRN reconstruction and show it to perform significantly better than or comparably to existing methods. In addition to its high accuracy and speed, SPREd marks a first step towards incorporating biophysics principles of gene regulation into ML-based approaches to GRN reconstruction.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zijun Wu
- Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA
| | - Saurabh Sinha
- Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA
- H. Milton Steward School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30318, USA
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13
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Mao G, Pang Z, Zuo K, Wang Q, Pei X, Chen X, Liu J. Predicting gene regulatory links from single-cell RNA-seq data using graph neural networks. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:bbad414. [PMID: 37985457 PMCID: PMC10661972 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad414] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/03/2023] [Revised: 10/25/2023] [Accepted: 10/26/2023] [Indexed: 11/22/2023] Open
Abstract
Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) has emerged as a powerful technique for studying gene expression patterns at the single-cell level. Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from scRNA-seq data provides insight into cellular phenotypes from the genomic level. However, the high sparsity, noise and dropout events inherent in scRNA-seq data present challenges for GRN inference. In recent years, the dramatic increase in data on experimentally validated transcription factors binding to DNA has made it possible to infer GRNs by supervised methods. In this study, we address the problem of GRN inference by framing it as a graph link prediction task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called GNNLink, which leverages known GRNs to deduce the potential regulatory interdependencies between genes. First, we preprocess the raw scRNA-seq data. Then, we introduce a graph convolutional network-based interaction graph encoder to effectively refine gene features by capturing interdependencies between nodes in the network. Finally, the inference of GRN is obtained by performing matrix completion operation on node features. The features obtained from model training can be applied to downstream tasks such as measuring similarity and inferring causality between gene pairs. To evaluate the performance of GNNLink, we compare it with six existing GRN reconstruction methods using seven scRNA-seq datasets. These datasets encompass diverse ground truth networks, including functional interaction networks, Loss of Function/Gain of Function data, non-specific ChIP-seq data and cell-type-specific ChIP-seq data. Our experimental results demonstrate that GNNLink achieves comparable or superior performance across these datasets, showcasing its robustness and accuracy. Furthermore, we observe consistent performance across datasets of varying scales. For reproducibility, we provide the data and source code of GNNLink on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/sdesignates/GNNLink.
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Affiliation(s)
- Guo Mao
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Zhengbin Pang
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Ke Zuo
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Qinglin Wang
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Xiangdong Pei
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Xinhai Chen
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Jie Liu
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
- Laboratory of Software Engineering for Complex System, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
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14
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Shojaee A, Huang SSC. Robust discovery of gene regulatory networks from single-cell gene expression data by Causal Inference Using Composition of Transactions. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:bbad370. [PMID: 37897702 PMCID: PMC10612495 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad370] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/18/2023] [Revised: 09/06/2023] [Accepted: 09/29/2023] [Indexed: 10/30/2023] Open
Abstract
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) drive organism structure and functions, so the discovery and characterization of GRNs is a major goal in biological research. However, accurate identification of causal regulatory connections and inference of GRNs using gene expression datasets, more recently from single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq), has been challenging. Here we employ the innovative method of Causal Inference Using Composition of Transactions (CICT) to uncover GRNs from scRNA-seq data. The basis of CICT is that if all gene expressions were random, a non-random regulatory gene should induce its targets at levels different from the background random process, resulting in distinct patterns in the whole relevance network of gene-gene associations. CICT proposes novel network features derived from a relevance network, which enable any machine learning algorithm to predict causal regulatory edges and infer GRNs. We evaluated CICT using simulated and experimental scRNA-seq data in a well-established benchmarking pipeline and showed that CICT outperformed existing network inference methods representing diverse approaches with many-fold higher accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrated that GRN inference with CICT was robust to different levels of sparsity in scRNA-seq data, the characteristics of data and ground truth, the choice of association measure and the complexity of the supervised machine learning algorithm. Our results suggest aiming at directly predicting causality to recover regulatory relationships in complex biological networks substantially improves accuracy in GRN inference.
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Affiliation(s)
- Abbas Shojaee
- Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA
| | - Shao-shan Carol Huang
- Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA
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15
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Wang J, Chen Y, Zou Q. Inferring gene regulatory network from single-cell transcriptomes with graph autoencoder model. PLoS Genet 2023; 19:e1010942. [PMID: 37703293 PMCID: PMC10519590 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1010942] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/11/2023] [Revised: 09/25/2023] [Accepted: 08/29/2023] [Indexed: 09/15/2023] Open
Abstract
The gene regulatory structure of cells involves not only the regulatory relationship between two genes, but also the cooperative associations of multiple genes. However, most gene regulatory network inference methods for single cell only focus on and infer the regulatory relationships of pairs of genes, ignoring the global regulatory structure which is crucial to identify the regulations in the complex biological systems. Here, we proposed a graph-based Deep learning model for Regulatory networks Inference among Genes (DeepRIG) from single-cell RNA-seq data. To learn the global regulatory structure, DeepRIG builds a prior regulatory graph by transforming the gene expression of data into the co-expression mode. Then it utilizes a graph autoencoder model to embed the global regulatory information contained in the graph into gene latent embeddings and to reconstruct the gene regulatory network. Extensive benchmarking results demonstrate that DeepRIG can accurately reconstruct the gene regulatory networks and outperform existing methods on multiple simulated networks and real-cell regulatory networks. Additionally, we applied DeepRIG to the samples of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells and triple-negative breast cancer, and presented that DeepRIG can provide accurate cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks inference and identify novel regulators of progression and inhibition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jiacheng Wang
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
- Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou, Zhejiang, China
| | - Yaojia Chen
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Quan Zou
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
- Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou, Zhejiang, China
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16
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Dautle M, Zhang S, Chen Y. scTIGER: A Deep-Learning Method for Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks from Case versus Control scRNA-seq Datasets. Int J Mol Sci 2023; 24:13339. [PMID: 37686146 PMCID: PMC10488287 DOI: 10.3390/ijms241713339] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/02/2023] [Revised: 08/06/2023] [Accepted: 08/23/2023] [Indexed: 09/10/2023] Open
Abstract
Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data is an important computational question to find regulatory mechanisms involved in fundamental cellular processes. Although many computational methods have been designed to predict GRNs from scRNA-seq data, they usually have high false positive rates and none infer GRNs by directly using the paired datasets of case-versus-control experiments. Here we present a novel deep-learning-based method, named scTIGER, for GRN detection by using the co-differential relationships of gene expression profiles in paired scRNA-seq datasets. scTIGER employs cell-type-based pseudotiming, an attention-based convolutional neural network method and permutation-based significance testing for inferring GRNs among gene modules. As state-of-the-art applications, we first applied scTIGER to scRNA-seq datasets of prostate cancer cells, and successfully identified the dynamic regulatory networks of AR, ERG, PTEN and ATF3 for same-cell type between prostatic cancerous and normal conditions, and two-cell types within the prostatic cancerous environment. We then applied scTIGER to scRNA-seq data from neurons with and without fear memory and detected specific regulatory networks for BDNF, CREB1 and MAPK4. Additionally, scTIGER demonstrates robustness against high levels of dropout noise in scRNA-seq data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Madison Dautle
- Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ 08028, USA;
| | - Shaoqiang Zhang
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China
| | - Yong Chen
- Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ 08028, USA;
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17
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Reagor CC, Velez-Angel N, Hudspeth AJ. Depicting pseudotime-lagged causality across single-cell trajectories for accurate gene-regulatory inference. PNAS NEXUS 2023; 2:pgad113. [PMID: 37113980 PMCID: PMC10129065 DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad113] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/23/2022] [Revised: 03/21/2023] [Accepted: 03/23/2023] [Indexed: 04/29/2023]
Abstract
Identifying the causal interactions in gene-regulatory networks requires an accurate understanding of the time-lagged relationships between transcription factors and their target genes. Here we describe DELAY (short for Depicting Lagged Causality), a convolutional neural network for the inference of gene-regulatory relationships across pseudotime-ordered single-cell trajectories. We show that combining supervised deep learning with joint probability matrices of pseudotime-lagged trajectories allows the network to overcome important limitations of ordinary Granger causality-based methods, for example, the inability to infer cyclic relationships such as feedback loops. Our network outperforms several common methods for inferring gene regulation and, when given partial ground-truth labels, predicts novel regulatory networks from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single-cell ATAC sequencing (scATAC-seq) data sets. To validate this approach, we used DELAY to identify important genes and modules in the regulatory network of auditory hair cells, as well as likely DNA-binding partners for two hair cell cofactors (Hist1h1c and Ccnd1) and a novel binding sequence for the hair cell-specific transcription factor Fiz1. We provide an easy-to-use implementation of DELAY under an open-source license at https://github.com/calebclayreagor/DELAY.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Nicolas Velez-Angel
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY 10065, USA
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18
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Mao G, Pang Z, Zuo K, Liu J. Gene Regulatory Network Inference Using Convolutional Neural Networks from scRNA-seq Data. J Comput Biol 2023; 30:619-631. [PMID: 36877552 DOI: 10.1089/cmb.2022.0355] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/07/2023] Open
Abstract
In recent years, with the rapid development of single-cell sequencing technology, this brings new opportunities and challenges to reconstruct gene regulatory networks. On the one hand, scRNA-seq data reveal statistical information of gene expression at single-cell resolution, which is beneficial to construct gene expression regulatory networks. On the other hand, the noise and dropout of single-cell data bring great difficulties to the analysis of scRNA-seq data, resulting in lower accuracy of gene regulatory networks reconstructed by traditional methods. In this article, we propose a novel supervised convolutional neural network (CNNSE), which can extract gene expression information from 2D co-expression matrices of gene doublets and identify interactions between genes. Our method can avoid the loss of extreme point interference by constructing a 2D co-expression matrix of gene pairs and significantly improve the regulation precision between gene pairs. And the CNNSE model is able to obtain detailed and high-level semantic information from the 2D co-expression matrix. Our method achieves satisfactory results on simulated data [accuracy (ACC): 0.712, F1: 0.724]. On two real scRNA-seq datasets, our method exhibits higher stability and accuracy in inference tasks compared with other existing gene regulatory network inference algorithms.
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Affiliation(s)
- Guo Mao
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
| | - Zhengbin Pang
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
| | - Ke Zuo
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
| | - Jie Liu
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
- Laboratory of Software Engineering for Complex System, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
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19
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Zhang Y, Wang M, Wang Z, Liu Y, Xiong S, Zou Q. MetaSEM: Gene Regulatory Network Inference from Single-Cell RNA Data by Meta-Learning. Int J Mol Sci 2023; 24:ijms24032595. [PMID: 36768917 PMCID: PMC9916710 DOI: 10.3390/ijms24032595] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/11/2022] [Revised: 01/23/2023] [Accepted: 01/26/2023] [Indexed: 01/31/2023] Open
Abstract
Regulators in gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are crucial for identifying cell states. However, GRN inference based on scRNA-seq data has several problems, including high dimensionality and sparsity, and requires more label data. Therefore, we propose a meta-learning GRN inference framework to identify regulatory factors. Specifically, meta-learning solves the parameter optimization problem caused by high-dimensional sparse data features. In addition, a few-shot solution was used to solve the problem of lack of label data. A structural equation model (SEM) was embedded in the model to identify important regulators. We integrated the parameter optimization strategy into the bi-level optimization to extract the feature consistent with GRN reasoning. This unique design makes our model robust to small-scale data. By studying the GRN inference task, we confirmed that the selected regulators were closely related to gene expression specificity. We further analyzed the GRN inferred to find the important regulators in cell type identification. Extensive experimental results showed that our model effectively captured the regulator in single-cell GRN inference. Finally, the visualization results verified the importance of the selected regulators for cell type recognition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yongqing Zhang
- School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China
| | - Maocheng Wang
- School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China
| | - Zixuan Wang
- School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China
| | - Yuhang Liu
- School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China
| | - Shuwen Xiong
- School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China
| | - Quan Zou
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610051, China
- Correspondence:
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20
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Lin Z, Ou-Yang L. Inferring gene regulatory networks from single-cell gene expression data via deep multi-view contrastive learning. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:6965907. [PMID: 36585783 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbac586] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/10/2022] [Revised: 11/28/2022] [Accepted: 11/29/2022] [Indexed: 01/01/2023] Open
Abstract
The inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is of great importance for understanding the complex regulatory mechanisms within cells. The emergence of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies enables the measure of gene expression levels for individual cells, which promotes the reconstruction of GRNs at single-cell resolution. However, existing network inference methods are mainly designed for data collected from a single data source, which ignores the information provided by multiple related data sources. In this paper, we propose a multi-view contrastive learning (DeepMCL) model to infer GRNs from scRNA-seq data collected from multiple data sources or time points. We first represent each gene pair as a set of histogram images, and then introduce a deep Siamese convolutional neural network with contrastive loss to learn the low-dimensional embedding for each gene pair. Moreover, an attention mechanism is introduced to integrate the embeddings extracted from different data sources and different neighbor gene pairs. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our contrastive learning and attention mechanisms, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model in integrating multiple data sources for GRN inference.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zerun Lin
- Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Media Security, and Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy(SZ), College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China
| | - Le Ou-Yang
- Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Media Security, and Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy(SZ), College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China
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21
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Galindez G, Sadegh S, Baumbach J, Kacprowski T, List M. Network-based approaches for modeling disease regulation and progression. Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2022; 21:780-795. [PMID: 36698974 PMCID: PMC9841310 DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2022.12.022] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/15/2022] [Revised: 12/14/2022] [Accepted: 12/14/2022] [Indexed: 12/23/2022] Open
Abstract
Molecular interaction networks lay the foundation for studying how biological functions are controlled by the complex interplay of genes and proteins. Investigating perturbed processes using biological networks has been instrumental in uncovering mechanisms that underlie complex disease phenotypes. Rapid advances in omics technologies have prompted the generation of high-throughput datasets, enabling large-scale, network-based analyses. Consequently, various modeling techniques, including network enrichment, differential network extraction, and network inference, have proven to be useful for gaining new mechanistic insights. We provide an overview of recent network-based methods and their core ideas to facilitate the discovery of disease modules or candidate mechanisms. Knowledge generated from these computational efforts will benefit biomedical research, especially drug development and precision medicine. We further discuss current challenges and provide perspectives in the field, highlighting the need for more integrative and dynamic network approaches to model disease development and progression.
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Affiliation(s)
- Gihanna Galindez
- Division Data Science in Biomedicine, Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics of Technische Universität Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Braunschweig, Germany.,Braunschweig Integrated Centre of Systems Biology (BRICS), TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
| | - Sepideh Sadegh
- Chair of Experimental Bioinformatics, TUM School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany.,Institute for Computational Systems Biology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
| | - Jan Baumbach
- Institute for Computational Systems Biology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.,Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - Tim Kacprowski
- Division Data Science in Biomedicine, Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics of Technische Universität Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Braunschweig, Germany.,Braunschweig Integrated Centre of Systems Biology (BRICS), TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
| | - Markus List
- Chair of Experimental Bioinformatics, TUM School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany
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22
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Su M, Pan T, Chen QZ, Zhou WW, Gong Y, Xu G, Yan HY, Li S, Shi QZ, Zhang Y, He X, Jiang CJ, Fan SC, Li X, Cairns MJ, Wang X, Li YS. Data analysis guidelines for single-cell RNA-seq in biomedical studies and clinical applications. Mil Med Res 2022; 9:68. [PMID: 36461064 PMCID: PMC9716519 DOI: 10.1186/s40779-022-00434-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2022] [Accepted: 11/18/2022] [Indexed: 12/03/2022] Open
Abstract
The application of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) in biomedical research has advanced our understanding of the pathogenesis of disease and provided valuable insights into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. With the expansion of capacity for high-throughput scRNA-seq, including clinical samples, the analysis of these huge volumes of data has become a daunting prospect for researchers entering this field. Here, we review the workflow for typical scRNA-seq data analysis, covering raw data processing and quality control, basic data analysis applicable for almost all scRNA-seq data sets, and advanced data analysis that should be tailored to specific scientific questions. While summarizing the current methods for each analysis step, we also provide an online repository of software and wrapped-up scripts to support the implementation. Recommendations and caveats are pointed out for some specific analysis tasks and approaches. We hope this resource will be helpful to researchers engaging with scRNA-seq, in particular for emerging clinical applications.
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Affiliation(s)
- Min Su
- State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China
| | - Tao Pan
- College of Biomedical Information and Engineering, the First Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, 571199, Hainan, China
| | - Qiu-Zhen Chen
- State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China
| | - Wei-Wei Zhou
- College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, Heilongjiang, China
| | - Yi Gong
- State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China.,Department of Immunology, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China
| | - Gang Xu
- College of Biomedical Information and Engineering, the First Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, 571199, Hainan, China
| | - Huan-Yu Yan
- State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China
| | - Si Li
- College of Biomedical Information and Engineering, the First Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, 571199, Hainan, China
| | - Qiao-Zhen Shi
- State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China
| | - Ya Zhang
- College of Biomedical Information and Engineering, the First Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, 571199, Hainan, China
| | - Xiao He
- Department of Laboratory Medicine, Women and Children's Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, 401174, China
| | | | - Shi-Cai Fan
- Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen, 518110, Guangdong, China
| | - Xia Li
- College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, Heilongjiang, China.
| | - Murray J Cairns
- School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, Faculty of Health and Medicine, the University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia. .,Precision Medicine Research Program, Hunter Medical Research Institute, New Lambton Heights, NSW, 2305, Australia.
| | - Xi Wang
- State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, China.
| | - Yong-Sheng Li
- College of Biomedical Information and Engineering, the First Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, 571199, Hainan, China.
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23
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Xu Y, Chen J, Lyu A, Cheung WK, Zhang L. dynDeepDRIM: a dynamic deep learning model to infer direct regulatory interactions using time-course single-cell gene expression data. Brief Bioinform 2022; 23:6720420. [PMID: 36168811 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbac424] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/23/2022] [Revised: 08/02/2022] [Accepted: 09/01/2022] [Indexed: 12/14/2022] Open
Abstract
Time-course single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data have been widely used to explore dynamic changes in gene expression of transcription factors (TFs) and their target genes. This information is useful to reconstruct cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks (GRNs). However, the existing tools are commonly designed to analyze either time-course bulk gene expression data or static scRNA-seq data via pseudo-time cell ordering. A few methods successfully utilize the information from multiple time points while also considering the characteristics of scRNA-seq data. We proposed dynDeepDRIM, a novel deep learning model to reconstruct GRNs using time-course scRNA-seq data. It represents the joint expression of a gene pair as an image and utilizes the image of the target TF-gene pair and the ones of the potential neighbors to reconstruct GRNs from time-course scRNA-seq data. dynDeepDRIM can effectively remove the transitive TF-gene interactions by considering neighborhood context and model the gene expression dynamics using high-dimensional tensors. We compared dynDeepDRIM with six GRN reconstruction methods on both simulation and four real time-course scRNA-seq data. dynDeepDRIM achieved substantially better performance than the other methods in inferring TF-gene interactions and eliminated the false positives effectively. We also applied dynDeepDRIM to annotate gene functions and found it achieved evidently better performance than the other tools due to considering the neighbor genes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yu Xu
- Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
| | - Jiaxing Chen
- Computer Science and Technology, Division of Science and Technology, BNU-HKBU United International College, Jintong Road, 519087, Zhuhai, China
| | - Aiping Lyu
- School of Chinese Medicine, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
| | - William K Cheung
- Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
| | - Lu Zhang
- Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
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24
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Chen G, Liu ZP. Graph attention network for link prediction of gene regulations from single-cell RNA-sequencing data. Bioinformatics 2022; 38:4522-4529. [PMID: 35961023 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac559] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/29/2022] [Revised: 07/18/2022] [Accepted: 08/10/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data provides unprecedented opportunities to reconstruct gene regulatory networks (GRNs) at fine-grained resolution. Numerous unsupervised or self-supervised models have been proposed to infer GRN from bulk RNA-seq data, but few of them are appropriate for scRNA-seq data under the circumstance of low signal-to-noise ratio and dropout. Fortunately, the surging of TF-DNA binding data (e.g. ChIP-seq) makes supervised GRN inference possible. We regard supervised GRN inference as a graph-based link prediction problem that expects to learn gene low-dimensional vectorized representations to predict potential regulatory interactions. RESULTS In this paper, we present GENELink to infer latent interactions between transcription factors (TFs) and target genes in GRN using graph attention network. GENELink projects the single-cell gene expression with observed TF-gene pairs to a low-dimensional space. Then, the specific gene representations are learned to serve for downstream similarity measurement or causal inference of pairwise genes by optimizing the embedding space. Compared to eight existing GRN reconstruction methods, GENELink achieves comparable or better performance on seven scRNA-seq datasets with four types of ground-truth networks. We further apply GENELink on scRNA-seq of human breast cancer metastasis and reveal regulatory heterogeneity of Notch and Wnt signalling pathways between primary tumour and lung metastasis. Moreover, the ontology enrichment results of unique lung metastasis GRN indicate that mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) is functionally important during the seeding step of the cancer metastatic cascade, which is validated by pharmacological assays. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The code and data are available at https://github.com/zpliulab/GENELink. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
- Guangyi Chen
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong 250061, China
| | - Zhi-Ping Liu
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong 250061, China
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Shu H, Ding F, Zhou J, Xue Y, Zhao D, Zeng J, Ma J. Boosting single-cell gene regulatory network reconstruction via bulk-cell transcriptomic data. Brief Bioinform 2022; 23:6693602. [PMID: 36070863 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbac389] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/30/2022] [Revised: 08/09/2022] [Accepted: 08/11/2022] [Indexed: 11/12/2022] Open
Abstract
Computational recovery of gene regulatory network (GRN) has recently undergone a great shift from bulk-cell towards designing algorithms targeting single-cell data. In this work, we investigate whether the widely available bulk-cell data could be leveraged to assist the GRN predictions for single cells. We infer cell-type-specific GRNs from both the single-cell RNA sequencing data and the generic GRN derived from the bulk cells by constructing a weakly supervised learning framework based on the axial transformer. We verify our assumption that the bulk-cell transcriptomic data are a valuable resource, which could improve the prediction of single-cell GRN by conducting extensive experiments. Our GRN-transformer achieves the state-of-the-art prediction accuracy in comparison to existing supervised and unsupervised approaches. In addition, we show that our method can identify important transcription factors and potential regulations for Alzheimer's disease risk genes by using the predicted GRN. Availability: The implementation of GRN-transformer is available at https://github.com/HantaoShu/GRN-Transformer.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hantao Shu
- Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Fan Ding
- Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, IN 47907, United States
| | - Jingtian Zhou
- Genomic Analysis Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, United States.,Bioinformatics Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, United States
| | - Yexiang Xue
- Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, IN 47907, United States
| | - Dan Zhao
- Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Jianyang Zeng
- Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Jianzhu Ma
- Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing 100091, China
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26
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Ran R, Gong CY, Wang ZQ, Zhou WM, Zhang SB, Shi YQ, Ma CW, Zhang HH. Long non‑coding RNA PART1: dual role in cancer. Hum Cell 2022; 35:1364-1374. [PMID: 35864416 DOI: 10.1007/s13577-022-00752-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/29/2022] [Accepted: 07/14/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022]
Abstract
Increasing evidence has shown that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), which are non-coding endogenous single-stranded RNAs, play an essential role in various physiological and pathological processes through transcriptional interference, post-transcriptional regulation, and epigenetic modification. Moreover, lncRNAs, as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes, play an important role in the occurrence and development of human cancers. Prostate androgen-regulated transcript 1 (PART1) was initially identified as a carcinogenic lncRNA in prostate adenomas. The upregulated expression of PART1 plays a tumor-promoting role in liver, prostate, lung cancers, and other tumors. In contrast, the expression of PART1 is downregulated in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, glioma, and other tumors, which may inhibit the tumor. PART1 plays a dual role in cancer and regulates cell proliferation, apoptosis, invasion, and metastasis through a variety of potential mechanisms. These findings suggest that PART1 is a promising tumor biomarker and therapeutic target. This article reviews the biological functions, related mechanisms, and potential clinical significance of PART1 in a variety of human cancers.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rui Ran
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Chao-Yang Gong
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Zhi-Qiang Wang
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Wen-Ming Zhou
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Shun-Bai Zhang
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Yong-Qiang Shi
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Chun-Wei Ma
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.,Orthopaedics Key Laboratory of Gansu Province, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China
| | - Hai-Hong Zhang
- Lanzhou University Second Hospital, 82 Cuiying Men, Lanzhou, 730000, People's Republic of China.
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27
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Long non-coding RNAs and cancer mechanisms: Immune cells and inflammatory cytokines in the tumor microenvironment. Med Oncol 2022; 39:108. [PMID: 35578054 DOI: 10.1007/s12032-022-01680-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/01/2021] [Accepted: 02/05/2022] [Indexed: 02/06/2023]
Abstract
Chronic inflammation and immune response are two central hallmarks of the tumor microenvironment (TME), teeming with immune cells and inflammatory cytokines that promote tumor progression. Intriguingly, there is mutual regulation between immune cells and cytokines. Indeed, the differentiation and function of immune cells depend on cytokines secreted from tumor cells, whereas immune activation affects the dynamics of cytokines, reshaping the TME together. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) as a blooming molecule are virtually involved in physiology and pathology events, especially TME. Notably, the regulatory loop between lncRNAs and cytokines or immune activation plays a vital role in tumor growth. Thus, this review concentrates on the interaction between lncRNAs and immune cells. It puts special attention to the intertwist between lncRNAs and cytokines or immune cells, providing a theoretical basis for lncRNAs as a potential biomarker and therapeutic tumor target.
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28
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Zhao M, He W, Tang J, Zou Q, Guo F. A hybrid deep learning framework for gene regulatory network inference from single-cell transcriptomic data. Brief Bioinform 2022; 23:6513730. [DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbab568] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/28/2021] [Revised: 12/09/2021] [Accepted: 12/11/2021] [Indexed: 12/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Abstract
Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) based on gene expression profiles is able to provide an insight into a number of cellular phenotypes from the genomic level and reveal the essential laws underlying various life phenomena. Different from the bulk expression data, single-cell transcriptomic data embody cell-to-cell variance and diverse biological information, such as tissue characteristics, transformation of cell types, etc. Inferring GRNs based on such data offers unprecedented advantages for making a profound study of cell phenotypes, revealing gene functions and exploring potential interactions. However, the high sparsity, noise and dropout events of single-cell transcriptomic data pose new challenges for regulation identification. We develop a hybrid deep learning framework for GRN inference from single-cell transcriptomic data, DGRNS, which encodes the raw data and fuses recurrent neural network and convolutional neural network (CNN) to train a model capable of distinguishing related gene pairs from unrelated gene pairs. To overcome the limitations of such datasets, it applies sliding windows to extract valuable features while preserving the direction of regulation. DGRNS is constructed as a deep learning model containing gated recurrent unit network for exploring time-dependent information and CNN for learning spatially related information. Our comprehensive and detailed comparative analysis on the dataset of mouse hematopoietic stem cells illustrates that DGRNS outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The networks inferred by DGRNS are about 16% higher than the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of other unsupervised methods and 10% higher than the area under the precision recall curve of other supervised methods. Experiments on human datasets show the strong robustness and excellent generalization of DGRNS. By comparing the predictions with standard network, we discover a series of novel interactions which are proved to be true in some specific cell types. Importantly, DGRNS identifies a series of regulatory relationships with high confidence and functional consistency, which have not yet been experimentally confirmed and merit further research.
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Prediction of Time Series Gene Expression and Structural Analysis of Gene Regulatory Networks Using Recurrent Neural Networks. ENTROPY 2022; 24:e24020141. [PMID: 35205437 PMCID: PMC8871363 DOI: 10.3390/e24020141] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/13/2021] [Revised: 01/14/2022] [Accepted: 01/15/2022] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
Abstract
Methods for time series prediction and classification of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data have been treated separately so far. The recent emergence of attention-based recurrent neural network (RNN) models boosted the interpretability of RNN parameters, making them appealing for the understanding of gene interactions. In this work, we generated synthetic time series gene expression data from a range of archetypal GRNs and we relied on a dual attention RNN to predict the gene temporal dynamics. We show that the prediction is extremely accurate for GRNs with different architectures. Next, we focused on the attention mechanism of the RNN and, using tools from graph theory, we found that its graph properties allow one to hierarchically distinguish different architectures of the GRN. We show that the GRN responded differently to the addition of noise in the prediction by the RNN and we related the noise response to the analysis of the attention mechanism. In conclusion, this work provides a way to understand and exploit the attention mechanism of RNNs and it paves the way to RNN-based methods for time series prediction and inference of GRNs from gene expression data.
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