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Cui W, Long Q, Xiao M, Wang X, Feng G, Li X, Wang P, Zhou Y. Refining computational inference of gene regulatory networks: integrating knockout data within a multi-task framework. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae361. [PMID: 39082651 PMCID: PMC11289685 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae361] [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: 01/23/2024] [Revised: 05/09/2024] [Accepted: 07/16/2024] [Indexed: 08/03/2024] Open
Abstract
Constructing accurate gene regulatory network s (GRNs), which reflect the dynamic governing process between genes, is critical to understanding the diverse cellular process and unveiling the complexities in biological systems. With the development of computer sciences, computational-based approaches have been applied to the GRNs inference task. However, current methodologies face challenges in effectively utilizing existing topological information and prior knowledge of gene regulatory relationships, hindering the comprehensive understanding and accurate reconstruction of GRNs. In response, we propose a novel graph neural network (GNN)-based Multi-Task Learning framework for GRN reconstruction, namely MTLGRN. Specifically, we first encode the gene promoter sequences and the gene biological features and concatenate the corresponding feature representations. Then, we construct a multi-task learning framework including GRN reconstruction, Gene knockout predict, and Gene expression matrix reconstruction. With joint training, MTLGRN can optimize the gene latent representations by integrating gene knockout information, promoter characteristics, and other biological attributes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines on the GRN reconstruction task, efficiently leveraging biological knowledge and comprehensively understanding the gene regulatory relationships. MTLGRN also pioneered attempts to simulate gene knockouts on bulk data by incorporating gene knockout information.
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Affiliation(s)
- Wentao Cui
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Informatization Plaza No. 2 Dong Sheng Nan Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China
| | - Qingqing Long
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Informatization Plaza No. 2 Dong Sheng Nan Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
| | - Meng Xiao
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Informatization Plaza No. 2 Dong Sheng Nan Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China
| | - Xuezhi Wang
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Informatization Plaza No. 2 Dong Sheng Nan Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China
| | - Guihai Feng
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China
- State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1 Beichen West Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, China
| | - Xin Li
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China
- State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1 Beichen West Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, China
| | - Pengfei Wang
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Informatization Plaza No. 2 Dong Sheng Nan Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China
| | - Yuanchun Zhou
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Informatization Plaza No. 2 Dong Sheng Nan Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, 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 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] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/06/2024] [Revised: 06/18/2024] [Accepted: 06/28/2024] [Indexed: 07/03/2024] Open
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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Zhang ZY, Sun ZJ, Gao D, Hao YD, Lin H, Liu F. Excavation of gene markers associated with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma based on interrelationships of gene expression. IET Syst Biol 2024. [PMID: 38530028 DOI: 10.1049/syb2.12090] [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: 11/20/2023] [Revised: 02/06/2024] [Accepted: 03/10/2024] [Indexed: 03/27/2024] Open
Abstract
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) accounts for 95% of all pancreatic cancer cases, posing grave challenges to its diagnosis and treatment. Timely diagnosis is pivotal for improving patient survival, necessitating the discovery of precise biomarkers. An innovative approach was introduced to identify gene markers for precision PDAC detection. The core idea of our method is to discover gene pairs that display consistent opposite relative expression and differential co-expression patterns between PDAC and normal samples. Reversal gene pair analysis and differential partial correlation analysis were performed to determine reversal differential partial correlation (RDC) gene pairs. Using incremental feature selection, the authors refined the selected gene set and constructed a machine-learning model for PDAC recognition. As a result, the approach identified 10 RDC gene pairs. And the model could achieve a remarkable accuracy of 96.1% during cross-validation, surpassing gene expression-based models. The experiment on independent validation data confirmed the model's performance. Enrichment analysis revealed the involvement of these genes in essential biological processes and shed light on their potential roles in PDAC pathogenesis. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of these 10 RDC gene pairs as effective diagnostic markers for early PDAC detection, bringing hope for improving patient prognosis and survival.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zhao-Yue Zhang
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
- School of Healthcare Technology, Chengdu Neusoft University, Chengdu, China
| | - Zi-Jie Sun
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Dong Gao
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Yu-Duo Hao
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Hao Lin
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Fen Liu
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Peking University Cancer Hospital (Inner Mongolia Campus), Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Inner Mongolia Medical University, Inner Mongolia Cancer Hospital, Hohhot, China
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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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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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Xu J, Zhang A, Liu F, Zhang X. STGRNS: an interpretable transformer-based method for inferring gene regulatory networks from single-cell transcriptomic data. Bioinformatics 2023; 39:btad165. [PMID: 37004161 PMCID: PMC10085635 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad165] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 10.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/25/2022] [Revised: 02/28/2023] [Accepted: 03/25/2023] [Indexed: 04/03/2023] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies provide an opportunity to infer cell-specific gene regulatory networks (GRNs), which is an important challenge in systems biology. Although numerous methods have been developed for inferring GRNs from scRNA-seq data, it is still a challenge to deal with cellular heterogeneity. RESULTS To address this challenge, we developed an interpretable transformer-based method namely STGRNS for inferring GRNs from scRNA-seq data. In this algorithm, gene expression motif technique was proposed to convert gene pairs into contiguous sub-vectors, which can be used as input for the transformer encoder. By avoiding missing phase-specific regulations in a network, gene expression motif can improve the accuracy of GRN inference for different types of scRNA-seq data. To assess the performance of STGRNS, we implemented the comparative experiments with some popular methods on extensive benchmark datasets including 21 static and 27 time-series scRNA-seq dataset. All the results show that STGRNS is superior to other comparative methods. In addition, STGRNS was also proved to be more interpretable than "black box" deep learning methods, which are well-known for the difficulty to explain the predictions clearly. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The source code and data are available at https://github.com/zhanglab-wbgcas/STGRNS.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jing Xu
- Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enhancement and Specialty Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
| | - Aidi Zhang
- Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enhancement and Specialty Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China
| | - Fang Liu
- Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enhancement and Specialty Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China
| | - Xiujun Zhang
- Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enhancement and Specialty Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China
- Center of Economic Botany, Core Botanical Gardens, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430074 China
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Fan R, Suo B, Ding Y. Identification of Vesicle Transport Proteins via Hypergraph Regularized K-Local Hyperplane Distance Nearest Neighbour Model. Front Genet 2022; 13:960388. [PMID: 35910197 PMCID: PMC9326258 DOI: 10.3389/fgene.2022.960388] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/02/2022] [Accepted: 06/22/2022] [Indexed: 12/04/2022] Open
Abstract
The prediction of protein function is a common topic in the field of bioinformatics. In recent years, advances in machine learning have inspired a growing number of algorithms for predicting protein function. A large number of parameters and fairly complex neural networks are often used to improve the prediction performance, an approach that is time-consuming and costly. In this study, we leveraged traditional features and machine learning classifiers to boost the performance of vesicle transport protein identification and make the prediction process faster. We adopt the pseudo position-specific scoring matrix (PsePSSM) feature and our proposed new classifier hypergraph regularized k-local hyperplane distance nearest neighbour (HG-HKNN) to classify vesicular transport proteins. We address dataset imbalances with random undersampling. The results show that our strategy has an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.870 and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.53 on the benchmark dataset, outperforming all state-of-the-art methods on the same dataset, and other metrics of our model are also comparable to existing methods.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rui Fan
- 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, China
| | - Bing Suo
- Beidahuang Industry Group General Hospital, Harbin, China
| | - Yijie Ding
- Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou, China
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