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Giordano M, Falbo E, Maddalena L, Piccirillo M, Granata I. Untangling the Context-Specificity of Essential Genes by Means of Machine Learning: A Constructive Experience. Biomolecules 2023; 14:18. [PMID: 38254618 PMCID: PMC10813179 DOI: 10.3390/biom14010018] [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: 10/18/2023] [Revised: 11/29/2023] [Accepted: 12/20/2023] [Indexed: 01/24/2024] Open
Abstract
Gene essentiality is a genetic concept crucial for a comprehensive understanding of life and evolution. In the last decade, many essential genes (EGs) have been determined using different experimental and computational approaches, and this information has been used to reduce the genomes of model organisms. A growing amount of evidence highlights that essentiality is a property that depends on the context. Because of their importance in vital biological processes, recognising context-specific EGs (csEGs) could help for identifying new potential pharmacological targets and to improve precision therapeutics. Since most of the computational procedures proposed to identify and predict EGs neglect their context-specificity, we focused on this aspect, providing a theoretical and experimental overview of the literature, data and computational methods dedicated to recognising csEGs. To this end, we adapted existing computational methods to exploit a specific context (the kidney tissue) and experimented with four different prediction methods using the labels provided by four different identification approaches. The considerations derived from the analysis of the obtained results, confirmed and validated also by further experiments for a different tissue context, provide the reader with guidance on exploiting existing tools for achieving csEGs identification and prediction.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maurizio Giordano
- Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR), National Research Council (CNR), V. Pietro Castellino 111, 80131 Naples, Italy; (E.F.); (L.M.); (M.P.); (I.G.)
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Chen P, Li Z, Hong Z, Zheng H, Zeng R. Tumor type classification and candidate cancer-specific biomarkers discovery via semi-supervised learning. BIOPHYSICS REPORTS 2023; 9:57-66. [PMID: 37753058 PMCID: PMC10518520 DOI: 10.52601/bpr.2023.230005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/22/2023] [Accepted: 04/26/2023] [Indexed: 09/28/2023] Open
Abstract
Identifying cancer-related differentially expressed genes provides significant information for diagnosing tumors, predicting prognoses, and effective treatments. Recently, deep learning methods have been used to perform gene differential expression analysis using microarray-based high-throughput gene profiling and have achieved good results. In this study, we proposed a new robust multiple-datasets-based semi-supervised learning model, MSSL, to perform tumor type classification and candidate cancer-specific biomarkers discovery across multiple tumor types and multiple datasets, which addressed the following long-lasting obstacles: (1) the data volume of the existing single dataset is not enough to fully exert the advantages of deep learning; (2) a large number of datasets from different research institutions cannot be effectively used due to inconsistent internal variances and low quality; (3) relatively uncommon cancers have limited effects on deep learning methods. In our article, we applied MSSL to The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Gene Expression Comprehensive Database (GEO) pan-cancer normalized-level3 RNA-seq data and got 97.6% final classification accuracy, which had a significant performance leap compared with previous approaches. Finally, we got the ranking of the importance of the corresponding genes for each cancer type based on classification results and validated that the top genes selected in this way were biologically meaningful for corresponding tumors and some of them had been used as biomarkers, which showed the efficacy of our method.
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Affiliation(s)
- Peng Chen
- School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
| | - Zhenlei Li
- School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
| | - Zhaolin Hong
- School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
| | - Haoran Zheng
- School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
- Anhui Key Laboratory of Software Engineering in Computing and Communication, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
- Department of Systems Biology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
| | - Rong Zeng
- CAS Key Laboratory of Systems Biology, Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
- School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China
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Rout RK, Umer S, Khandelwal M, Pati S, Mallik S, Balabantaray BK, Qin H. Identification of discriminant features from stationary pattern of nucleotide bases and their application to essential gene classification. Front Genet 2023; 14:1154120. [PMID: 37152988 PMCID: PMC10156977 DOI: 10.3389/fgene.2023.1154120] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/30/2023] [Accepted: 04/04/2023] [Indexed: 05/09/2023] Open
Abstract
Introduction: Essential genes are essential for the survival of various species. These genes are a family linked to critical cellular activities for species survival. These genes are coded for proteins that regulate central metabolism, gene translation, deoxyribonucleic acid replication, and fundamental cellular structure and facilitate intracellular and extracellular transport. Essential genes preserve crucial genomics information that may hold the key to a detailed knowledge of life and evolution. Essential gene studies have long been regarded as a vital topic in computational biology due to their relevance. An essential gene is composed of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine and its various combinations. Methods: This paper presents a novel method of extracting information on the stationary patterns of nucleotides such as adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine in each gene. For this purpose, some co-occurrence matrices are derived that provide the statistical distribution of stationary patterns of nucleotides in the genes, which is helpful in establishing the relationship between the nucleotides. For extracting discriminant features from each co-occurrence matrix, energy, entropy, homogeneity, contrast, and dissimilarity features are computed, which are extracted from all co-occurrence matrices and then concatenated to form a feature vector representing each essential gene. Finally, supervised machine learning algorithms are applied for essential gene classification based on the extracted fixed-dimensional feature vectors. Results: For comparison, some existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques such as Shannon entropy (SE), Hurst exponent (HE), fractal dimension (FD), and their combinations have been utilized. Discussion: An extensive experiment has been performed for classifying the essential genes of five species that show the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ranjeet Kumar Rout
- National Institute of Technology Srinagar, Hazratbal, Jammu and Kashmir, India
| | - Saiyed Umer
- Aliah University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
| | - Monika Khandelwal
- National Institute of Technology Srinagar, Hazratbal, Jammu and Kashmir, India
| | - Smitarani Pati
- Dr. B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar, Jalandhar, Punjab, India
| | - Saurav Mallik
- Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States
- Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States
- *Correspondence: Saurav Mallik, , ; Hong Qin,
| | | | - Hong Qin
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN, United States
- *Correspondence: Saurav Mallik, , ; Hong Qin,
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Manzo M, Giordano M, Maddalena L, Guarracino MR, Granata I. Novel Data Science Methodologies for Essential Genes Identification Based on Network Analysis. STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE 2023:117-145. [DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24453-7_7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 09/02/2023]
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Li Y, Zeng M, Zhang F, Wu FX, Li M. DeepCellEss: cell line-specific essential protein prediction with attention-based interpretable deep learning. Bioinformatics 2022; 39:6865030. [PMID: 36458923 PMCID: PMC9825760 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac779] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/17/2022] [Revised: 11/25/2022] [Accepted: 12/01/2022] [Indexed: 12/05/2022] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Protein essentiality is usually accepted to be a conditional trait and strongly affected by cellular environments. However, existing computational methods often do not take such characteristics into account, preferring to incorporate all available data and train a general model for all cell lines. In addition, the lack of model interpretability limits further exploration and analysis of essential protein predictions. RESULTS In this study, we proposed DeepCellEss, a sequence-based interpretable deep learning framework for cell line-specific essential protein predictions. DeepCellEss utilizes a convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory to learn short- and long-range latent information from protein sequences. Further, a multi-head self-attention mechanism is used to provide residue-level model interpretability. For model construction, we collected extremely large-scale benchmark datasets across 323 cell lines. Extensive computational experiments demonstrate that DeepCellEss yields effective prediction performance for different cell lines and outperforms existing sequence-based methods as well as network-based centrality measures. Finally, we conducted some case studies to illustrate the necessity of considering specific cell lines and the superiority of DeepCellEss. We believe that DeepCellEss can serve as a useful tool for predicting essential proteins across different cell lines. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The DeepCellEss web server is available at http://csuligroup.com:8000/DeepCellEss. The source code and data underlying this study can be obtained from https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/DeepCellEss. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yiming Li
- Hunan Provincial Key Lab on Bioinformatics, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Min Zeng
- Hunan Provincial Key Lab on Bioinformatics, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Fuhao Zhang
- Hunan Provincial Key Lab on Bioinformatics, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Fang-Xiang Wu
- Division of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada
| | - Min Li
- To whom correspondence should be addressed.
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Li Y, Zeng M, Wu Y, Li Y, Li M. Accurate Prediction of Human Essential Proteins Using Ensemble Deep Learning. IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AND BIOINFORMATICS 2022; 19:3263-3271. [PMID: 34699365 DOI: 10.1109/tcbb.2021.3122294] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
Essential proteins are considered the foundation of life as they are indispensable for the survival of living organisms. Computational methods for essential protein discovery provide a fast way to identify essential proteins. But most of them heavily rely on various biological information, especially protein-protein interaction networks, which limits their practical applications. With the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing technology, sequencing data has become the most accessible biological data. However, using only protein sequence information to predict essential proteins has limited accuracy. In this paper, we propose EP-EDL, an ensemble deep learning model using only protein sequence information to predict human essential proteins. EP-EDL integrates multiple classifiers to alleviate the class imbalance problem and to improve prediction accuracy and robustness. In each base classifier, we employ multi-scale text convolutional neural networks to extract useful features from protein sequence feature matrices with evolutionary information. Our computational results show that EP-EDL outperforms the state-of-the-art sequence-based methods. Furthermore, EP-EDL provides a more practical and flexible way for biologists to accurately predict essential proteins. The source code and datasets can be downloaded from https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/EP-EDL.
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ELIMINATOR: essentiality analysis using multisystem networks and integer programming. BMC Bioinformatics 2022; 23:324. [PMID: 35933325 PMCID: PMC9357337 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-022-04855-z] [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: 02/10/2022] [Accepted: 07/21/2022] [Indexed: 11/28/2022] Open
Abstract
A gene is considered as essential when it is indispensable for cells to grow and replicate in a certain environment. However, gene essentiality is not a structural property but rather a contextual one, which depends on the specific biological conditions affecting the cell. This circumstantial essentiality of genes is what brings the attention of scientist since we can identify genes essential for cancer cells but not essential for healthy cells. This same contextuality makes their identification extremely challenging. Huge experimental efforts such as Project Achilles where the essentiality of thousands of genes is measured together with a plethora of molecular data (transcriptomics, copy number, mutations, etc.) in over one thousand cell lines can shed light on the causality behind the essentiality of a gene in a given environment. Here, we present an in-silico method for the identification of patient-specific essential genes using constraint-based modelling (CBM). Our method expands the ideas behind traditional CBM to accommodate multisystem networks. In essence, it first calculates the minimum number of lowly expressed genes required to be activated by the cell to sustain life as defined by a set of requirements; and second, it performs an exhaustive in-silico gene knockout to find those that lead to the need of activating additional lowly expressed genes. We validated the proposed methodology using a set of 452 cancer cell lines derived from the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia where an exhaustive experimental large-scale gene knockout study using CRISPR (Achilles Project) evaluates the impact of each removal. We also show that the integration of different essentiality predictions per gene, what we called Essentiality Congruity Score, reduces the number of false positives. Finally, we explored our method in a breast cancer patient dataset, and our results showed high concordance with previous publications. These findings suggest that identifying genes whose activity is fundamental to sustain cellular life in a patient-specific manner is feasible using in-silico methods. The patient-level gene essentiality predictions can pave the way for precision medicine by identifying potential drug targets whose deletion can induce death in tumour cells.
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Karagiannaki I, Gourlia K, Lagani V, Pantazis Y, Tsamardinos I. Learning biologically-interpretable latent representations for gene expression data: Pathway Activity Score Learning Algorithm. Mach Learn 2022; 112:4257-4287. [PMID: 37900054 PMCID: PMC10600308 DOI: 10.1007/s10994-022-06158-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/09/2021] [Revised: 11/12/2021] [Accepted: 02/19/2022] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
Abstract
Molecular gene-expression datasets consist of samples with tens of thousands of measured quantities (i.e., high dimensional data). However, lower-dimensional representations that retain the useful biological information do exist. We present a novel algorithm for such dimensionality reduction called Pathway Activity Score Learning (PASL). The major novelty of PASL is that the constructed features directly correspond to known molecular pathways (genesets in general) and can be interpreted as pathway activity scores. Hence, unlike PCA and similar methods, PASL's latent space has a fairly straightforward biological interpretation. PASL is shown to outperform in predictive performance the state-of-the-art method (PLIER) on two collections of breast cancer and leukemia gene expression datasets. PASL is also trained on a large corpus of 50000 gene expression samples to construct a universal dictionary of features across different tissues and pathologies. The dictionary validated on 35643 held-out samples for reconstruction error. It is then applied on 165 held-out datasets spanning a diverse range of diseases. The AutoML tool JADBio is employed to show that the predictive information in the PASL-created feature space is retained after the transformation. The code is available at https://github.com/mensxmachina/PASL.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ioulia Karagiannaki
- Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (IESL-FORTH), Heraklion, Greece
| | | | - Vincenzo Lagani
- Institute of Chemical Biology, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, 0162 Georgia
- JADBio, Gnosis Data Analysis PC, Heraklion, Crete Greece
| | - Yannis Pantazis
- Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Heraklion, Greece
| | - Ioannis Tsamardinos
- Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece
- JADBio, Gnosis Data Analysis PC, Heraklion, Crete Greece
- Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Heraklion, Greece
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Ai H. GSEA-SDBE: A gene selection method for breast cancer classification based on GSEA and analyzing differences in performance metrics. PLoS One 2022; 17:e0263171. [PMID: 35472078 PMCID: PMC9041804 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263171] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/23/2021] [Accepted: 01/13/2022] [Indexed: 12/20/2022] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Selecting the most relevant genes for sample classification is a common process in gene expression studies. Moreover, determining the smallest set of relevant genes that can achieve the required classification performance is particularly important in diagnosing cancer and improving treatment. RESULTS In this study, I propose a novel method to eliminate irrelevant and redundant genes, and thus determine the smallest set of relevant genes for breast cancer diagnosis. The method is based on random forest models, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), and my developed Sort Difference Backward Elimination (SDBE) algorithm; hence, the method is named GSEA-SDBE. Using this method, genes are filtered according to their importance following random forest training and GSEA is used to select genes by core enrichment of Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways that are strongly related to breast cancer. Subsequently, the SDBE algorithm is applied to eliminate redundant genes and identify the most relevant genes for breast cancer diagnosis. In the SDBE algorithm, the differences in the Matthews correlation coefficients (MCCs) of performing random forest models are computed before and after the deletion of each gene to indicate the degree of redundancy of the corresponding deleted gene on the remaining genes during backward elimination. Next, the obtained MCC difference list is divided into two parts from a set position and each part is respectively sorted. By continuously iterating and changing the set position, the most relevant genes are stably assembled on the left side of the gene list, facilitating their identification, and the redundant genes are gathered on the right side of the gene list for easy elimination. A cross-comparison of the SDBE algorithm was performed by respectively computing differences between MCCs and ROC_AUC_score and then respectively using 10-fold classification models, e.g., random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and extremely randomized trees (ExtraTrees). Finally, the classification performance of the proposed method was compared with that of three advanced algorithms for five cancer datasets. Results showed that analyzing MCC differences and using random forest models was the optimal solution for the SDBE algorithm. Accordingly, three consistently relevant genes (i.e., VEGFD, TSLP, and PKMYT1) were selected for the diagnosis of breast cancer. The performance metrics (MCC and ROC_AUC_score, respectively) of the random forest models based on 10-fold verification reached 95.28% and 98.75%. In addition, survival analysis showed that VEGFD and TSLP could be used to predict the prognosis of patients with breast cancer. Moreover, the proposed method significantly outperformed the other methods tested as it allowed selecting a smaller number of genes while maintaining the required classification accuracy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hu Ai
- Department of Criminal Technology, Guizhou Police College, Guiyang, Guizhou, China
- * E-mail:
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McGrath SP, Benton ML, Tavakoli M, Tatonetti NP. Predictions, Pivots, and a Pandemic: a Review of 2020's Top Translational Bioinformatics Publications. Yearb Med Inform 2021; 30:219-225. [PMID: 34479393 PMCID: PMC8416221 DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1726540] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/24/2022] Open
Abstract
OBJECTIVES Provide an overview of the emerging themes and notable papers which were published in 2020 in the field of Bioinformatics and Translational Informatics (BTI) for the International Medical Informatics Association Yearbook. METHODS A team of 16 individuals scanned the literature from the past year. Using a scoring rubric, papers were evaluated on their novelty, importance, and objective quality. 1,224 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms extracted from these papers were used to identify themes and research focuses. The authors then used the scoring results to select notable papers and trends presented in this manuscript. RESULTS The search phase identified 263 potential papers and central themes of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), machine learning, and bioinformatics were examined in greater detail. CONCLUSIONS When addressing a once in a centruy pandemic, scientists worldwide answered the call, with informaticians playing a critical role. Productivity and innovations reached new heights in both TBI and science, but significant research gaps remain.
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Affiliation(s)
- Scott P. McGrath
- CITRIS Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
| | | | - Maryam Tavakoli
- MTERMS Lab, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
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