GeneTIER: prioritization of candidate disease genes using tissue-specific gene expression profiles

Integrated data driven analysis identifies potential candidate genes associated with PCOS

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is one of the most common anovulatory disorder observed in women presenting with infertility. Several high and low throughput studies on PCOS have led to accumulation of vast amount of information on PCOS. Despite the availability of several resources which index the advances in PCOS, information on its etiology still remains inadequate. Analysis of the existing information using an integrated evidence based approach may aid identification of novel potential candidate genes with a role in PCOS pathophysiology. This work focuses on integrating existing information on PCOS from literature and gene expression studies and evaluating the application of gene prioritization and network analysis to predict missing novel candidates. Further, it assesses the utility of evidence-based scoring to rank genes for their association with PCOS. The results of this study led to identification of ∼2000 plausible candidate genes associated with PCOS. Insilico validation of these identified candidates confirmed the role of 938 genes in PCOS. Further, experimental validation was carried out for four of the potential candidate genes, a high-scoring (PROS1), two mid-scoring (C1QA and KNG1), and a low-scoring gene (VTN) involved in the complement and coagulation pathway by comparing protein levels in follicular fluid in women with PCOS and healthy controls. While the expression of PROS1, C1QA, and KNG1 was found to be significantly downregulated in women with PCOS, the expression of VTN was found to be unchanged in PCOS. The findings of this study reiterate the utility of employing insilico approaches to identify and prioritize the most promising candidate genes in diseases with a complex pathophysiology like PCOS. Further, the study also helps in gaining clearer insights into the molecular mechanisms associated with the manifestation of the PCOS phenotype by contributing to the existing repertoire of genes associated with PCOS.

STIGMA: Single-cell tissue-specific gene prioritization using machine learning

Clinical exome and genome sequencing have revolutionized the understanding of human disease genetics. Yet many genes remain functionally uncharacterized, complicating the establishment of causal disease links for genetic variants. While several scoring methods have been devised to prioritize these candidate genes, these methods fall short of capturing the expression heterogeneity across cell subpopulations within tissues. Here, we introduce single-cell tissue-specific gene prioritization using machine learning (STIGMA), an approach that leverages single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data to prioritize candidate genes associated with rare congenital diseases. STIGMA prioritizes genes by learning the temporal dynamics of gene expression across cell types during healthy organogenesis. To assess the efficacy of our framework, we applied STIGMA to mouse limb and human fetal heart scRNA-seq datasets. In a cohort of individuals with congenital limb malformation, STIGMA prioritized 469 variants in 345 genes, with UBA2 as a notable example. For congenital heart defects, we detected 34 genes harboring nonsynonymous de novo variants (nsDNVs) in two or more individuals from a set of 7,958 individuals, including the ortholog of Prdm1, which is associated with hypoplastic left ventricle and hypoplastic aortic arch. Overall, our findings demonstrate that STIGMA effectively prioritizes tissue-specific candidate genes by utilizing single-cell transcriptome data. The ability to capture the heterogeneity of gene expression across cell populations makes STIGMA a powerful tool for the discovery of disease-associated genes and facilitates the identification of causal variants underlying human genetic disorders.

WINNER: A network biology tool for biomolecular characterization and prioritization

BACKGROUND AND CONTRIBUTION

In network biology, molecular functions can be characterized by network-based inference, or "guilt-by-associations." PageRank-like tools have been applied in the study of biomolecular interaction networks to obtain further the relative significance of all molecules in the network. However, there is a great deal of inherent noise in widely accessible data sets for gene-to-gene associations or protein-protein interactions. How to develop robust tests to expand, filter, and rank molecular entities in disease-specific networks remains an ad hoc data analysis process.

RESULTS

We describe a new biomolecular characterization and prioritization tool called Weighted In-Network Node Expansion and Ranking (WINNER). It takes the input of any molecular interaction network data and generates an optionally expanded network with all the nodes ranked according to their relevance to one another in the network. To help users assess the robustness of results, WINNER provides two different types of statistics. The first type is a node-expansion p-value, which helps evaluate the statistical significance of adding "non-seed" molecules to the original biomolecular interaction network consisting of "seed" molecules and molecular interactions. The second type is a node-ranking p-value, which helps evaluate the relative statistical significance of the contribution of each node to the overall network architecture. We validated the robustness of WINNER in ranking top molecules by spiking noises in several network permutation experiments. We have found that node degree-preservation randomization of the gene network produced normally distributed ranking scores, which outperform those made with other gene network randomization techniques. Furthermore, we validated that a more significant proportion of the WINNER-ranked genes was associated with disease biology than existing methods such as PageRank. We demonstrated the performance of WINNER with a few case studies, including Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, myocardial infarctions, and Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). In all these case studies, the expanded and top-ranked genes identified by WINNER reveal disease biology more significantly than those identified by other gene prioritizing software tools, including Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) and DiAMOND.

CONCLUSION

WINNER ranking strongly correlates to other ranking methods when the network covers sufficient node and edge information, indicating a high network quality. WINNER users can use this new tool to robustly evaluate a list of candidate genes, proteins, or metabolites produced from high-throughput biology experiments, as long as there is available gene/protein/metabolic network information.

A novel candidate disease gene prioritization method using deep graph convolutional networks and semi-supervised learning

BACKGROUND

Selecting and prioritizing candidate disease genes is necessary before conducting laboratory studies as identifying disease genes from a large number of candidate genes using laboratory methods, is a very costly and time-consuming task. There are many machine learning-based gene prioritization methods. These methods differ in various aspects including the feature vectors of genes, the used datasets with different structures, and the learning model. Creating a suitable feature vector for genes and an appropriate learning model on a variety of data with different and non-Euclidean structures, including graphs, as well as the lack of negative data are very important challenges of these methods. The use of graph neural networks has recently emerged in machine learning and other related fields, and they have demonstrated superior performance for a broad range of problems.

METHODS

In this study, a new semi-supervised learning method based on graph convolutional networks is presented using the novel constructing feature vector for each gene. In the proposed method, first, we construct three feature vectors for each gene using terms from the Gene Ontology (GO) database. Then, we train a graph convolution network on these vectors using protein-protein interaction (PPI) network data to identify disease candidate genes. Our model discovers hidden layer representations encoding in both local graph structure as well as features of nodes. This method is characterized by the simultaneous consideration of topological information of the biological network (e.g., PPI) and other sources of evidence. Finally, a validation has been done to demonstrate the efficiency of our method.

RESULTS

Several experiments are performed on 16 diseases to evaluate the proposed method's performance. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the best results, in terms of precision, the area under the ROC curve (AUCs), and F1-score values, when compared with eight state-of-the-art network and machine learning-based disease gene prioritization methods.

CONCLUSION

This study shows that the proposed semi-supervised learning method appropriately classifies and ranks candidate disease genes using a graph convolutional network and an innovative method to create three feature vectors for genes based on the molecular function, cellular component, and biological process terms from GO data.

Rank-Similarity Measures for Comparing Gene Prioritizations: A Case Study in Autism

We discuss the challenge of comparing three gene prioritization methods: network propagation, integer linear programming rank aggregation (RA), and statistical RA. These methods are based on different biological categories and estimate disease-gene association. Previously proposed comparison schemes are based on three measures of performance: receiver operating curve, area under the curve, and median rank ratio. Although they may capture important aspects of gene prioritization performance, they may fail to capture important differences in the rankings of individual genes. We suggest that comparison schemes could be improved by also considering recently proposed measures of similarity between gene rankings. We tested this suggestion on comparison schemes for prioritizations of genes associated with autism that were obtained using brain- and tissue-specific data. Our results show the effectiveness of our measures of similarity in clustering brain regions based on their relevance to autism.

Integrative Genomic Enrichment Analysis Identified the Brain Regions and Development Stages Related to Anorexia Nervosa and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Our aim is to explore the spatial and temporal features of anorexia nervosa (AN) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) considering different brain regions and development stages. The gene sets related to 16 brain regions and nine development stages were obtained from a brain spatial and temporal transcriptomic dataset. Using the genome-wide association study data, transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) was conducted to identify the genes whose imputed expressions were associated with AN and OCD, respectively. The mRNA expression profiles were analyzed by GEO2R to obtain differentially expressed genes. Gene set enrichment analysis was conducted to detect the spatial and temporal features related to AN and OCD using the TWAS and mRNA expression analysis results. We observed multiple common association signals shared by TWAS and mRNA expression analysis of AN, such as the primary auditory cortex vs. cerebellar cortex in fetal development and earlier vs. later fetal development in the somatosensory cortex. For OCD, we also detected multiple common association signals, such as medial prefrontal cortex vs. amygdala in adulthood and fetal development vs. infancy in mediodorsal nucleus of thalamus. Our study provides novel clues for describing the spatial and temporal features of brain development in the pathogenesis of AN and OCD.

DESE: estimating driver tissues by selective expression of genes associated with complex diseases or traits

The driver tissues or cell types in which susceptibility genes initiate diseases remain elusive. We develop a unified framework to detect the causal tissues of complex diseases or traits according to selective expression of disease-associated genes in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). This framework consists of three components which run iteratively to produce a converged prioritization list of driver tissues. Additionally, this framework also outputs a list of prioritized genes as a byproduct. We apply the framework to six representative complex diseases or traits with GWAS summary statistics, which leads to the estimation of the lung as an associated tissue of rheumatoid arthritis.

Inferring Disease-Associated MicroRNAs Using Semi-supervised Multi-Label Graph Convolutional Networks

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play crucial roles in biological processes involved in diseases. The associations between diseases and protein-coding genes (PCGs) have been well investigated, and miRNAs interact with PCGs to trigger them to be functional. We present a computational method, DimiG, to infer miRNA-associated diseases using a semi-supervised Graph Convolutional Network model (GCN). DimiG uses a multi-label framework to integrate PCG-PCG interactions, PCG-miRNA interactions, PCG-disease associations, and tissue expression profiles. DimiG is trained on disease-PCG associations and an interaction network using a GCN, which is further used to score associations between diseases and miRNAs. We evaluate DimiG on a benchmark set from verified disease-miRNA associations. Our results demonstrate that DimiG outperforms the best unsupervised method and is comparable to two supervised methods. Three case studies of prostate cancer, lung cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease further demonstrate the efficacy of DimiG, where top miRNAs predicted by DimiG are supported by literature.

A Survey of Gene Prioritization Tools for Mendelian and Complex Human Diseases

Modern high-throughput experiments provide us with numerous potential associations between genes and diseases. Experimental validation of all the discovered associations, let alone all the possible interactions between them, is time-consuming and expensive. To facilitate the discovery of causative genes, various approaches for prioritization of genes according to their relevance for a given disease have been developed. In this article, we explain the gene prioritization problem and provide an overview of computational tools for gene prioritization. Among about a hundred of published gene prioritization tools, we select and briefly describe 14 most up-to-date and user-friendly. Also, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of existing tools, challenges of their validation, and the directions for future research.

Laser-capture microdissection of murine lung for differential cellular RNA analysis

The lung tissue contains a heterogeneous milieu of bronchioles, epithelial, airway smooth muscle (ASM), alveolar, and immune cell types. Healthy bronchiole comprises epithelial cells surrounded by ASM cells and helps in normal respiration. In contrast, airway remodeling, or plasticity, increases surrounding of bronchial epithelium during inflammation, especially in asthmatic condition. Given the profound functional difference between ASM, epithelial, and other cell types in the lung, it is imperative to separate and isolate different cell types of lungs for genomics, proteomics, and molecular analysis, which will improve the diagnostic and therapeutic approach to treat cell-specific lung disorders. Laser capture microdissection (LCM) is the technique generally used for the isolation of specific cell populations under direct visual inspection, which plays a crucial role to evaluate cell-specific effect in clinical and preclinical setup. However, maintenance of tissue RNA quality and integrity in LCM studies are very challenging tasks. It is obvious to believe that the major factor affecting the RNA quality is tissue-fixation method. The prime focus of this study was to address the RNA quality factors within the lung tissue using the different solvent system to fix tissue sample to obtain high-quality RNA. Paraformaldehyde and Carnoy's solutions were used for fixing the lung tissue and compared RNA integrity in LCM captured lung tissue samples. To further confirm the quality of RNA, we measured cellular marker genes in collected lung tissue samples from control and mixed allergen (MA)-induced asthmatic mouse model using qRT-PCR technique. RNA integrity number showed a significantly better quality of RNA in lung tissue samples fixed with Carnoy's solution compared to paraformaldehyde solution. Isolated RNA from MA-induced asthmatic murine lung epithelium, smooth muscle, and granulomatous foci using LCM showed a significant increase in remodeling gene expression compared to control which confirm the quality and integrity of isolated RNA. Overall, the study concludes tissue fixation solvent can alter the quality of RNA in the lung and the outcome of the results.

Predicting multicellular function through multi-layer tissue networks

Motivation

Understanding functions of proteins in specific human tissues is essential for insights into disease diagnostics and therapeutics, yet prediction of tissue-specific cellular function remains a critical challenge for biomedicine.

Results

Here, we present OhmNet, a hierarchy-aware unsupervised node feature learning approach for multi-layer networks. We build a multi-layer network, where each layer represents molecular interactions in a different human tissue. OhmNet then automatically learns a mapping of proteins, represented as nodes, to a neural embedding-based low-dimensional space of features. OhmNet encourages sharing of similar features among proteins with similar network neighborhoods and among proteins activated in similar tissues. The algorithm generalizes prior work, which generally ignores relationships between tissues, by modeling tissue organization with a rich multiscale tissue hierarchy. We use OhmNet to study multicellular function in a multi-layer protein interaction network of 107 human tissues. In 48 tissues with known tissue-specific cellular functions, OhmNet provides more accurate predictions of cellular function than alternative approaches, and also generates more accurate hypotheses about tissue-specific protein actions. We show that taking into account the tissue hierarchy leads to improved predictive power. Remarkably, we also demonstrate that it is possible to leverage the tissue hierarchy in order to effectively transfer cellular functions to a functionally uncharacterized tissue. Overall, OhmNet moves from flat networks to multiscale models able to predict a range of phenotypes spanning cellular subsystems.

Availability and implementation

Source code and datasets are available at http://snap.stanford.edu/ohmnet.

Constructing an integrated gene similarity network for the identification of disease genes

BACKGROUND

Discovering novel genes that are involved human diseases is a challenging task in biomedical research. In recent years, several computational approaches have been proposed to prioritize candidate disease genes. Most of these methods are mainly based on protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. However, since these PPI networks contain false positives and only cover less half of known human genes, their reliability and coverage are very low. Therefore, it is highly necessary to fuse multiple genomic data to construct a credible gene similarity network and then infer disease genes on the whole genomic scale.

RESULTS

We proposed a novel method, named RWRB, to infer causal genes of interested diseases. First, we construct five individual gene (protein) similarity networks based on multiple genomic data of human genes. Then, an integrated gene similarity network (IGSN) is reconstructed based on similarity network fusion (SNF) method. Finally, we employee the random walk with restart algorithm on the phenotype-gene bilayer network, which combines phenotype similarity network, IGSN as well as phenotype-gene association network, to prioritize candidate disease genes. We investigate the effectiveness of RWRB through leave-one-out cross-validation methods in inferring phenotype-gene relationships. Results show that RWRB is more accurate than state-of-the-art methods on most evaluation metrics. Further analysis shows that the success of RWRB is benefited from IGSN which has a wider coverage and higher reliability comparing with current PPI networks. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive case study for Alzheimer's disease and predict some novel disease genes that supported by literature.

CONCLUSIONS

RWRB is an effective and reliable algorithm in prioritizing candidate disease genes on the genomic scale. Software and supplementary information are available at http://nclab.hit.edu.cn/~tianzhen/RWRB/ .

Comprehensive Analysis of Tissue-wide Gene Expression and Phenotype Data Reveals Tissues Affected in Rare Genetic Disorders

Linking putatively pathogenic variants to the tissues they affect is necessary for determining the correct diagnostic workup and therapeutic regime in undiagnosed patients. Here, we explored how gene expression across healthy tissues can be used to infer this link. We integrated 6,665 tissue-wide transcriptomes with genetic disorder knowledge bases covering 3,397 diseases. Receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) analysis using expression levels in each tissue and across tissues indicated significant but modest associations between elevated expression and phenotype for most tissues (maximum area under ROC curve = 0.69). At extreme elevation, associations were marked. Upregulation of disease genes in affected tissues was pronounced for genes associated with autosomal dominant over recessive disorders. Pathways enriched for genes expressed and associated with phenotypes highlighted tissue functionality, including lipid metabolism in spleen and DNA repair in adipose tissue. These results suggest features useful for evaluating the likelihood of particular tissue manifestations in genetic disorders. The web address of an interactive platform integrating these data is provided.

brain-coX: investigating and visualising gene co-expression in seven human brain transcriptomic datasets

Background

The pathogenesis of neurological and mental health disorders often involves multiple genes, complex interactions, as well as brain- and development-specific biological mechanisms. These characteristics make identification of disease genes for such disorders challenging, as conventional prioritisation tools are not specifically tailored to deal with the complexity of the human brain. Thus, we developed a novel web-application—brain-coX—that offers gene prioritisation with accompanying visualisations based on seven gene expression datasets in the post-mortem human brain, the largest such resource ever assembled.

Results

We tested whether our tool can correctly prioritise known genes from 37 brain-specific KEGG pathways and 17 psychiatric conditions. We achieved average sensitivity of nearly 50%, at the same time reaching a specificity of approximately 75%. We also compared brain-coX’s performance to that of its main competitors, Endeavour and ToppGene, focusing on the ability to discover novel associations. Using a subset of the curated SFARI autism gene collection we show that brain-coX’s prioritisations are most similar to SFARI’s own curated gene classifications.

Conclusions

brain-coX is the first prioritisation and visualisation web-tool targeted to the human brain and can be freely accessed via http://shiny.bioinf.wehi.edu.au/freytag.s/.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13073-017-0444-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

QueryOR: a comprehensive web platform for genetic variant analysis and prioritization

Background

Whole genome and exome sequencing are contributing to the extraordinary progress in the study of human genetic variants. In this fast developing field, appropriate and easily accessible tools are required to facilitate data analysis.

Results

Here we describe QueryOR, a web platform suitable for searching among known candidate genes as well as for finding novel gene-disease associations. QueryOR combines several innovative features that make it comprehensive, flexible and easy to use. Instead of being designed on specific datasets, it works on a general XML schema specifying formats and criteria of each data source. Thanks to this flexibility, new criteria can be easily added for future expansion. Currently, up to 70 user-selectable criteria are available, including a wide range of gene and variant features. Moreover, rather than progressively discarding variants taking one criterion at a time, the prioritization is achieved by a global positive selection process that considers all transcript isoforms, thus producing reliable results. QueryOR is easy to use and its intuitive interface allows to handle different kinds of inheritance as well as features related to sharing variants in different patients. QueryOR is suitable for investigating single patients, families or cohorts.

Conclusions

QueryOR is a comprehensive and flexible web platform eligible for an easy user-driven variant prioritization. It is freely available for academic institutions at http://queryor.cribi.unipd.it/.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-017-1654-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Familial autoinflammation with neutrophilic dermatosis reveals a regulatory mechanism of pyrin activation

Pyrin responds to pathogen signals and loss of cellular homeostasis by forming an inflammasome complex that drives the cleavage and secretion of interleukin-1β (IL-1β). Mutations in the B30.2/SPRY domain cause pathogen-independent activation of pyrin and are responsible for the autoinflammatory disease familial Mediterranean fever (FMF). We studied a family with a dominantly inherited autoinflammatory disease, distinct from FMF, characterized by childhood-onset recurrent episodes of neutrophilic dermatosis, fever, elevated acute-phase reactants, arthralgia, and myalgia/myositis. The disease was caused by a mutation in MEFV, the gene encoding pyrin (S242R). The mutation results in the loss of a 14-3-3 binding motif at phosphorylated S242, which was not perturbed by FMF mutations in the B30.2/SPRY domain. However, loss of both S242 phosphorylation and 14-3-3 binding was observed for bacterial effectors that activate the pyrin inflammasome, such as Clostridium difficile toxin B (TcdB). The S242R mutation thus recapitulated the effect of pathogen sensing, triggering inflammasome activation and IL-1β production. Successful therapy targeting IL-1β has been initiated in one patient, resolving pyrin-associated autoinflammation with neutrophilic dermatosis. This disease provides evidence that a guard-like mechanism of pyrin regulation, originally identified for Nod-like receptors in plant innate immunity, also exists in humans.

Data sources for in vivo molecular profiling of human phenotypes

Molecular profiling of human diseases has been approached at the genetic (DNA), expression (RNA), and proteomic (protein) levels. An important goal of these efforts is to map observed molecular patterns to specific, mechanistic organic entities, such as loci in the genome, individual RNA molecules or defined proteins or protein assemblies. Importantly, such maps have been historically approached in the more intuitive context of a theoretical individual cell, but diseases are better described in reality using an in vivo framework, namely a library of several tissue-specific maps. In this article, we review the existing data atlases that can be used for this purpose and identify critical gaps that could move the field forward from cellular to in vivo dimensions. WIREs Syst Biol Med 2016, 8:472-484. doi: 10.1002/wsbm.1354 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

A Novel Prioritization Method in Identifying Recurrent Venous Thromboembolism-Related Genes

Identifying the genes involved in venous thromboembolism (VTE) recurrence is important not only for understanding the pathogenesis but also for discovering the therapeutic targets. We proposed a novel prioritization method called Function-Interaction-Pearson (FIP) by creating gene-disease similarity scores to prioritize candidate genes underling VTE. The scores were calculated by integrating and optimizing three types of resources including gene expression, gene ontology and protein-protein interaction. As a result, 124 out of top 200 prioritized candidate genes had been confirmed in literature, among which there were 34 antithrombotic drug targets. Compared with two well-known gene prioritization tools Endeavour and ToppNet, FIP was shown to have better performance. The approach provides a valuable alternative for drug targets discovery and disease therapy.

The anatomical distribution of genetic associations

Deeper understanding of the anatomical intermediaries for disease and other complex genetic traits is essential to understanding mechanisms and developing new interventions. Existing ontology tools provide functional, curated annotations for many genes and can be used to develop mechanistic hypotheses; yet information about the spatial expression of genes may be equally useful in interpreting results and forming novel hypotheses for a trait. Therefore, we developed an approach for statistically testing the relationship between gene expression across the body and sets of candidate genes from across the genome. We validated this tool and tested its utility on three applications. First, we show that the expression of genes in associated loci from GWA studies implicates specific tissues for 57 out of 98 traits. Second, we tested the ability of the tool to identify novel relationships between gene expression and phenotypes. Specifically, we experimentally confirmed an underappreciated prediction highlighted by our tool: that white blood cell count--a quantitative trait of the immune system--is genetically modulated by genes expressed in the skin. Finally, using gene lists derived from exome sequencing data, we show that human genes under selective constraint are disproportionately expressed in nervous system tissues.