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Gao Z, Jiang R, Chen S. OpenAnnotateApi: Python and R packages to efficiently annotate and analyze chromatin accessibility of genomic regions. BIOINFORMATICS ADVANCES 2024; 4:vbae055. [PMID: 38645715 PMCID: PMC11031356 DOI: 10.1093/bioadv/vbae055] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/29/2024] [Revised: 03/20/2024] [Accepted: 04/08/2024] [Indexed: 04/23/2024]
Abstract
Summary Chromatin accessibility serves as a critical measurement of physical contact between nuclear macromolecules and DNA sequence, providing valuable insights into the comprehensive landscape of regulatory mechanisms, thus we previously developed the OpenAnnotate web server. However, as an increasing number of epigenomic analysis software tools emerged, web-based annotation often faced limitations and inconveniences when integrated into these software pipelines. To address these issues, we here develop two software packages named OpenAnnotatePy and OpenAnnotateR. In addition to web-based functionalities, these packages encompass supplementary features, including the capability for simultaneous annotation across multiple cell types, advanced searching of systems, tissues and cell types, and converting the result to the data structure of mainstream tools. Moreover, we applied the packages to various scenarios, including cell type revealing, regulatory element prediction, and integration into mainstream single-cell ATAC-seq analysis pipelines including EpiScanpy, Signac, and ArchR. We anticipate that OpenAnnotateApi will significantly facilitate the deciphering of gene regulatory mechanisms, and offer crucial assistance in the field of epigenomic studies. Availability and implementation OpenAnnotateApi for R is available at https://github.com/ZjGaothu/OpenAnnotateR and for Python is available at https://github.com/ZjGaothu/OpenAnnotatePy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zijing Gao
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Rui Jiang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Shengquan Chen
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
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2
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Tang S, Cui X, Wang R, Li S, Li S, Huang X, Chen S. scCASE: accurate and interpretable enhancement for single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing data. Nat Commun 2024; 15:1629. [PMID: 38388573 PMCID: PMC10884038 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46045-w] [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: 09/21/2023] [Accepted: 02/12/2024] [Indexed: 02/24/2024] Open
Abstract
Single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing (scCAS) has emerged as a valuable tool for interrogating and elucidating epigenomic heterogeneity and gene regulation. However, scCAS data inherently suffers from limitations such as high sparsity and dimensionality, which pose significant challenges for downstream analyses. Although several methods are proposed to enhance scCAS data, there are still challenges and limitations that hinder the effectiveness of these methods. Here, we propose scCASE, a scCAS data enhancement method based on non-negative matrix factorization which incorporates an iteratively updating cell-to-cell similarity matrix. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, we demonstrate the advantages of scCASE over existing methods for scCAS data enhancement. The interpretable cell type-specific peaks identified by scCASE can provide valuable biological insights into cell subpopulations. Moreover, to leverage the large compendia of available omics data as a reference, we further expand scCASE to scCASER, which enables the incorporation of external reference data to improve enhancement performance.
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Affiliation(s)
- Songming Tang
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China
| | - Xuejian Cui
- MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Bioinformatics Division of BNRIST, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China
| | - Rongxiang Wang
- Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22903, USA
| | - Sijie Li
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China
| | - Siyu Li
- School of Statistics and Data Science, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China
| | - Xin Huang
- Beijing Key Laboratory for Radiobiology, Department of Radiation Biology, Beijing Institute of Radiation Medicine, 100850, Beijing, China
| | - Shengquan Chen
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China.
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3
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Gao Z, Liu Q, Zeng W, Jiang R, Wong WH. EpiGePT: a Pretrained Transformer model for epigenomics. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2023.07.15.549134. [PMID: 37502861 PMCID: PMC10370089 DOI: 10.1101/2023.07.15.549134] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 07/29/2023]
Abstract
The inherent similarities between natural language and biological sequences have given rise to great interest in adapting the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) underlying recent breakthroughs in natural language processing (references), for applications in genomics. However, current LLMs for genomics suffer from several limitations such as the inability to include chromatin interactions in the training data, and the inability to make prediction in new cellular contexts not represented in the training data. To mitigate these problems, we propose EpiGePT, a transformer-based pretrained language model for predicting context-specific epigenomic signals and chromatin contacts. By taking the context-specific activities of transcription factors (TFs) and 3D genome interactions into consideration, EpiGePT offers wider applicability and deeper biological insights than models trained on DNA sequence only. In a series of experiments, EpiGePT demonstrates superior performance in a diverse set of epigenomic signals prediction tasks when compared to existing methods. In particular, our model enables cross-cell-type prediction of long-range interactions and offers insight on the functional impact of genetic variants under different cellular contexts. These new capabilities will enhance the usefulness of LLM in the study of gene regulatory mechanisms. We provide free online prediction service of EpiGePT through http://health.tsinghua.edu.cn/epigept/.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zijing Gao
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Qiao Liu
- Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
| | - Wanwen Zeng
- Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
| | - Rui Jiang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Wing Hung Wong
- Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
- Department of Biomedical Data Science, Bio-X Program, Center for Personal Dynamic Regulomes, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
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4
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Li K, Chen X, Song S, Hou L, Chen S, Jiang R. Cofea: correlation-based feature selection for single-cell chromatin accessibility data. Brief Bioinform 2023; 25:bbad458. [PMID: 38113078 PMCID: PMC10782922 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad458] [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: 07/14/2023] [Revised: 11/19/2023] [Accepted: 11/20/2023] [Indexed: 12/21/2023] Open
Abstract
Single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing (scCAS) technologies have enabled characterizing the epigenomic heterogeneity of individual cells. However, the identification of features of scCAS data that are relevant to underlying biological processes remains a significant gap. Here, we introduce a novel method Cofea, to fill this gap. Through comprehensive experiments on 5 simulated and 54 real datasets, Cofea demonstrates its superiority in capturing cellular heterogeneity and facilitating downstream analysis. Applying this method to identification of cell type-specific peaks and candidate enhancers, as well as pathway enrichment analysis and partitioned heritability analysis, we illustrate the potential of Cofea to uncover functional biological process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Keyi Li
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Xiaoyang Chen
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Shuang Song
- Center for Statistical Science, Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Lin Hou
- Center for Statistical Science, Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Shengquan Chen
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
| | - Rui Jiang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Division at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
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5
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Zhang W, Jiang R, Chen S, Wang Y. scIBD: a self-supervised iterative-optimizing model for boosting the detection of heterotypic doublets in single-cell chromatin accessibility data. Genome Biol 2023; 24:225. [PMID: 37814314 PMCID: PMC10561408 DOI: 10.1186/s13059-023-03072-y] [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: 04/30/2023] [Accepted: 09/22/2023] [Indexed: 10/11/2023] Open
Abstract
Application of the widely used droplet-based microfluidic technologies in single-cell sequencing often yields doublets, introducing bias to downstream analyses. Especially, doublet-detection methods for single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing (scCAS) data have multiple assay-specific challenges. Therefore, we propose scIBD, a self-supervised iterative-optimizing model for boosting heterotypic doublet detection in scCAS data. scIBD introduces an adaptive strategy to simulate high-confident heterotypic doublets and self-supervise for doublet-detection in an iteratively optimizing manner. Comprehensive benchmarking on various simulated and real datasets demonstrates the outperformance and robustness of scIBD. Moreover, the downstream biological analyses suggest the efficacy of doublet-removal by scIBD.
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Affiliation(s)
- Wenhao Zhang
- Department of Automation, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361000, Fujian, China
- National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361000, Fujian, China
| | - Rui Jiang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China
| | - Shengquan Chen
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China.
| | - Ying Wang
- Department of Automation, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361000, Fujian, China.
- National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361000, Fujian, China.
- Xiamen Key Laboratory of Big Data Intelligent Analysis and Decision, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian, China.
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6
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Ding K, Sun S, Luo Y, Long C, Zhai J, Zhai Y, Wang G. PlantCADB: A Comprehensive Plant Chromatin Accessibility Database. GENOMICS, PROTEOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS 2023; 21:311-323. [PMID: 36328151 PMCID: PMC10626055 DOI: 10.1016/j.gpb.2022.10.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/08/2022] [Revised: 09/25/2022] [Accepted: 10/24/2022] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
Abstract
Chromatin accessibility landscapes are essential for detecting regulatory elements, illustrating the corresponding regulatory networks, and, ultimately, understanding the molecular basis underlying key biological processes. With the advancement of sequencing technologies, a large volume of chromatin accessibility data has been accumulated and integrated for humans and other mammals. These data have greatly advanced the study of disease pathogenesis, cancer survival prognosis, and tissue development. To advance the understanding of molecular mechanisms regulating plant key traits and biological processes, we developed a comprehensive plant chromatin accessibility database (PlantCADB) from 649 samples of 37 species. These samples are abiotic stress-related (such as heat, cold, drought, and salt; 159 samples), development-related (232 samples), and/or tissue-specific (376 samples). Overall, 18,339,426 accessible chromatin regions (ACRs) were compiled. These ACRs were annotated with genomic information, associated genes, transcription factor footprint, motif, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Additionally, PlantCADB provides various tools to visualize ACRs and corresponding annotations. It thus forms an integrated, annotated, and analyzed plant-related chromatin accessibility resource, which can aid in better understanding genetic regulatory networks underlying development, important traits, stress adaptations, and evolution.PlantCADB is freely available at https://bioinfor.nefu.edu.cn/PlantCADB/.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ke Ding
- State Key Laboratory of Tree Genetics and Breeding, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China; College of Information and Computer Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
| | - Shanwen Sun
- College of Life Science, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
| | - Yang Luo
- College of Information and Computer Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
| | - Chaoyue Long
- College of Information and Computer Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
| | - Jingwen Zhai
- College of Information and Computer Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
| | - Yixiao Zhai
- College of Information and Computer Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
| | - Guohua Wang
- State Key Laboratory of Tree Genetics and Breeding, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China; College of Information and Computer Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China.
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7
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Zhang Z, Chen S, Lin Z. RefTM: reference-guided topic modeling of single-cell chromatin accessibility data. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:6895319. [PMID: 36513377 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbac540] [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: 07/22/2022] [Revised: 10/27/2022] [Accepted: 11/09/2022] [Indexed: 12/15/2022] Open
Abstract
Single-cell analysis is a valuable approach for dissecting the cellular heterogeneity, and single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing (scCAS) can profile the epigenetic landscapes for thousands of individual cells. It is challenging to analyze scCAS data, because of its high dimensionality and a higher degree of sparsity compared with scRNA-seq data. Topic modeling in single-cell data analysis can lead to robust identification of the cell types and it can provide insight into the regulatory mechanisms. Reference-guided approach may facilitate the analysis of scCAS data by utilizing the information in existing datasets. We present RefTM (Reference-guided Topic Modeling of single-cell chromatin accessibility data), which not only utilizes the information in existing bulk chromatin accessibility and annotated scCAS data, but also takes advantage of topic models for single-cell data analysis. RefTM simultaneously models: (1) the shared biological variation among reference data and the target scCAS data; (2) the unique biological variation in scCAS data; (3) other variations from known covariates in scCAS data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zheng Zhang
- Department of Statistics in the Chinese University of Hong Kong
| | - Shengquan Chen
- School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC in Nankai university
| | - Zhixiang Lin
- Department of Statistics in the Chinese University of Hong Kong
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8
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Liu Q, Zeng W, Zhang W, Wang S, Chen H, Jiang R, Zhou M, Zhang S. Deep generative modeling and clustering of single cell Hi-C data. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:6858951. [PMID: 36458445 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbac494] [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: 07/20/2022] [Revised: 09/28/2022] [Accepted: 10/18/2022] [Indexed: 12/05/2022] Open
Abstract
Deciphering 3D genome conformation is important for understanding gene regulation and cellular function at a spatial level. The recent advances of single cell Hi-C technologies have enabled the profiling of the 3D architecture of DNA within individual cell, which allows us to study the cell-to-cell variability of 3D chromatin organization. Computational approaches are in urgent need to comprehensively analyze the sparse and heterogeneous single cell Hi-C data. Here, we proposed scDEC-Hi-C, a new framework for single cell Hi-C analysis with deep generative neural networks. scDEC-Hi-C outperforms existing methods in terms of single cell Hi-C data clustering and imputation. Moreover, the generative power of scDEC-Hi-C could help unveil the differences of chromatin architecture across cell types. We expect that scDEC-Hi-C could shed light on deepening our understanding of the complex mechanism underlying the formation of chromatin contacts.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qiao Liu
- Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
| | - Wanwen Zeng
- College of Software, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
| | - Wei Zhang
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong 250061, China
| | - Sicheng Wang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
| | - Hongyang Chen
- The Research Center for Intelligent Network, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou 311121, China
| | - Rui Jiang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Mu Zhou
- SenseBrain Research, San Jose, CA 95131, USA
| | - Shaoting Zhang
- Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai 200240, China
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9
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Liu Q, Hua K, Zhang X, Wong WH, Jiang R. DeepCAGE: Incorporating Transcription Factors in Genome-wide Prediction of Chromatin Accessibility. GENOMICS, PROTEOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS 2022; 20:496-507. [PMID: 35293310 PMCID: PMC9801045 DOI: 10.1016/j.gpb.2021.08.015] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/31/2021] [Revised: 05/31/2021] [Accepted: 09/27/2021] [Indexed: 01/26/2023]
Abstract
Although computational approaches have been complementing high-throughput biological experiments for the identification of functional regions in the human genome, it remains a great challenge to systematically decipher interactions between transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements to achieve interpretable annotations of chromatin accessibility across diverse cellular contexts. To solve this problem, we propose DeepCAGE, a deep learning framework that integrates sequence information and binding statuses of TFs, for the accurate prediction of chromatin accessible regions at a genome-wide scale in a variety of cell types. DeepCAGE takes advantage of a densely connected deep convolutional neural network architecture to automatically learn sequence signatures of known chromatin accessible regions and then incorporates such features with expression levels and binding activities of human core TFs to predict novel chromatin accessible regions. In a series of systematic comparisons with existing methods, DeepCAGE exhibits superior performance in not only the classification but also the regression of chromatin accessibility signals. In a detailed analysis of TF activities, DeepCAGE successfully extracts novel binding motifs and measures the contribution of a TF to the regulation with respect to a specific locus in a certain cell type. When applied to whole-genome sequencing data analysis, our method successfully prioritizes putative deleterious variants underlying a human complex trait and thus provides insights into the understanding of disease-associated genetic variants. DeepCAGE can be downloaded from https://github.com/kimmo1019/DeepCAGE.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qiao Liu
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics; Bioinformatics Division, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China,Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
| | - Kui Hua
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics; Bioinformatics Division, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Xuegong Zhang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics; Bioinformatics Division, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Wing Hung Wong
- Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA,Corresponding authors.
| | - Rui Jiang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics; Bioinformatics Division, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China,Corresponding authors.
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10
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Xu S, Skarica M, Hwang A, Dai Y, Lee C, Girgenti MJ, Zhang J. Translator: A Transfer Learning Approach to Facilitate Single-Cell ATAC-Seq Data Analysis fr om Reference Dataset. J Comput Biol 2022; 29:619-633. [PMID: 35584295 PMCID: PMC9464368 DOI: 10.1089/cmb.2021.0596] [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: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Recent advances in single-cell sequencing assay for transposase-accessible chromatin (scATAC-seq) have allowed simultaneous epigenetic profiling over thousands of individual cells to dissect the cellular heterogeneity and elucidate regulatory mechanisms at the finest possible resolution. However, scATAC-seq is challenging to model computationally due to the ultra-high dimensionality, low signal-to-noise ratio, complex feature interactions, and high vulnerability to various confounding factors. In this study, we present Translator, an efficient transfer learning approach to capture generalizable chromatin interactions from high-quality (HQ) reference scATAC-seq data to obtain robust cell representations in low-to-moderate quality target scATAC-seq data. We applied Translator on various simulated and real scATAC-seq datasets and demonstrated that Translator could learn more biologically meaningful cell representations than other methods by incorporating information learned from the reference data, thus facilitating various downstream analyses such as clustering and motif enrichment measurements. Moreover, Translator's block-wise deep learning framework can handle nonlinear relationships with restricted connections using fewer parameters to boost computational efficiency through Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) parallelism. Finally, we have implemented Translator as a free software package available for the community to leverage large-scale, HQ reference data to study target scATAC-seq data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Siwei Xu
- Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
| | - Mario Skarica
- Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
| | - Ahyeon Hwang
- Mathematical, Computational, and Systems Biology, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
| | - Yi Dai
- Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
| | - Cheyu Lee
- Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
| | - Matthew J Girgenti
- Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.,Clinical Neurosciences Division, National Center for PTSD U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Washington, DC, USA
| | - Jing Zhang
- Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
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11
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Moon S, Lee H. MOMA: a multi-task attention learning algorithm for multi-omics data interpretation and classification. Bioinformatics 2022; 38:2287-2296. [PMID: 35157023 PMCID: PMC10060719 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac080] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/29/2021] [Revised: 01/01/2022] [Accepted: 02/08/2022] [Indexed: 02/03/2023] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Accurate diagnostic classification and biological interpretation are important in biology and medicine, which are data-rich sciences. Thus, integration of different data types is necessary for the high predictive accuracy of clinical phenotypes, and more comprehensive analyses for predicting the prognosis of complex diseases are required. RESULTS Here, we propose a novel multi-task attention learning algorithm for multi-omics data, termed MOMA, which captures important biological processes for high diagnostic performance and interpretability. MOMA vectorizes features and modules using a geometric approach and focuses on important modules in multi-omics data via an attention mechanism. Experiments using public data on Alzheimer's disease and cancer with various classification tasks demonstrated the superior performance of this approach. The utility of MOMA was also verified using a comparison experiment with an attention mechanism that was turned on or off and biological analysis. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The source codes are available at https://github.com/dmcb-gist/MOMA. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary materials are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sehwan Moon
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju 61005, South Korea
| | - Hyunju Lee
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju 61005, South Korea
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12
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Shengquan C, Boheng Z, Xiaoyang C, Xuegong Z, Rui J. stPlus: a reference-based method for the accurate enhancement of spatial transcriptomics. Bioinformatics 2021; 37:i299-i307. [PMID: 34252941 PMCID: PMC8336594 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btab298] [Citation(s) in RCA: 35] [Impact Index Per Article: 11.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 04/25/2021] [Indexed: 11/15/2022] Open
Abstract
Motivation Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) techniques have revolutionized the investigation of transcriptomic landscape in individual cells. Recent advancements in spatial transcriptomic technologies further enable gene expression profiling and spatial organization mapping of cells simultaneously. Among the technologies, imaging-based methods can offer higher spatial resolutions, while they are limited by either the small number of genes imaged or the low gene detection sensitivity. Although several methods have been proposed for enhancing spatially resolved transcriptomics, inadequate accuracy of gene expression prediction and insufficient ability of cell-population identification still impede the applications of these methods. Results We propose stPlus, a reference-based method that leverages information in scRNA-seq data to enhance spatial transcriptomics. Based on an auto-encoder with a carefully tailored loss function, stPlus performs joint embedding and predicts spatial gene expression via a weighted k-nearest-neighbor. stPlus outperforms baseline methods with higher gene-wise and cell-wise Spearman correlation coefficients. We also introduce a clustering-based approach to assess the enhancement performance systematically. Using the data enhanced by stPlus, cell populations can be better identified than using the measured data. The predicted expression of genes unique to scRNA-seq data can also well characterize spatial cell heterogeneity. Besides, stPlus is robust and scalable to datasets of diverse gene detection sensitivity levels, sample sizes and number of spatially measured genes. We anticipate stPlus will facilitate the analysis of spatial transcriptomics. Availability and implementation stPlus with detailed documents is freely accessible at http://health.tsinghua.edu.cn/software/stPlus/ and the source code is openly available on https://github.com/xy-chen16/stPlus.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chen Shengquan
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Zhang Boheng
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Chen Xiaoyang
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Zhang Xuegong
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Jiang Rui
- Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
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13
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Song S, Shan N, Wang G, Yan X, Liu JS, Hou L. Openness Weighted Association Studies: Leveraging Personal Genome Information to Prioritize Noncoding Variants. Bioinformatics 2021; 37:4737-4743. [PMID: 34260700 PMCID: PMC8665759 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btab514] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/22/2021] [Revised: 06/16/2021] [Accepted: 07/07/2021] [Indexed: 11/15/2022] Open
Abstract
Motivation Identification and interpretation of non-coding variations that affect disease risk remain a paramount challenge in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of complex diseases. Experimental efforts have provided comprehensive annotations of functional elements in the human genome. On the other hand, advances in computational biology, especially machine learning approaches, have facilitated accurate predictions of cell-type-specific functional annotations. Integrating functional annotations with GWAS signals has advanced the understanding of disease mechanisms. In previous studies, functional annotations were treated as static of a genomic region, ignoring potential functional differences imposed by different genotypes across individuals. Results We develop a computational approach, Openness Weighted Association Studies (OWAS), to leverage and aggregate predictions of chromosome accessibility in personal genomes for prioritizing GWAS signals. The approach relies on an analytical expression we derived for identifying disease associated genomic segments whose effects in the etiology of complex diseases are evaluated. In extensive simulations and real data analysis, OWAS identifies genes/segments that explain more heritability than existing methods, and has a better replication rate in independent cohorts than GWAS. Moreover, the identified genes/segments show tissue-specific patterns and are enriched in disease relevant pathways. We use rheumatic arthritis and asthma as examples to demonstrate how OWAS can be exploited to provide novel insights on complex diseases. Availability and implementation The R package OWAS that implements our method is available at https://github.com/shuangsong0110/OWAS. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shuang Song
- Center for Statistical Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.,Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
| | - Nayang Shan
- Center for Statistical Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.,Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
| | - Geng Wang
- University of Queensland Diamantina Institute, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
| | - Xiting Yan
- Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.,Department of Biostatistics, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
| | - Jun S Liu
- Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
| | - Lin Hou
- Center for Statistical Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.,Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.,MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
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Chen S, Gan M, Lv H, Jiang R. DeepCAPE: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for the Accurate Prediction of Enhancers. GENOMICS PROTEOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS 2021; 19:565-577. [PMID: 33581335 PMCID: PMC9040020 DOI: 10.1016/j.gpb.2019.04.006] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/24/2018] [Revised: 03/15/2019] [Accepted: 04/29/2019] [Indexed: 12/12/2022]
Abstract
The establishment of a landscape of enhancers across human cells is crucial to deciphering the mechanism of gene regulation, cell differentiation, and disease development. High-throughput experimental approaches, which contain successfully reported enhancers in typical cell lines, are still too costly and time-consuming to perform systematic identification of enhancers specific to different cell lines. Existing computational methods, capable of predicting regulatory elements purely relying on DNA sequences, lack the power of cell line-specific screening. Recent studies have suggested that chromatin accessibility of a DNA segment is closely related to its potential function in regulation, and thus may provide useful information in identifying regulatory elements. Motivated by the aforementioned understanding, we integrate DNA sequences and chromatin accessibility data to accurately predict enhancers in a cell line-specific manner. We proposed DeepCAPE, a deep convolutional neural network to predict enhancers via the integration of DNA sequences and DNase-seq data. Benefitting from the well-designed feature extraction mechanism and skip connection strategy, our model not only consistently outperforms existing methods in the imbalanced classification of cell line-specific enhancers against background sequences, but also has the ability to self-adapt to different sizes of datasets. Besides, with the adoption of auto-encoder, our model is capable of making cross-cell line predictions. We further visualize kernels of the first convolutional layer and show the match of identified sequence signatures and known motifs. We finally demonstrate the potential ability of our model to explain functional implications of putative disease-associated genetic variants and discriminate disease-related enhancers. The source code and detailed tutorial of DeepCAPE are freely available at https://github.com/ShengquanChen/DeepCAPE.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shengquan Chen
- MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Mingxin Gan
- Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
| | - Hairong Lv
- MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
| | - Rui Jiang
- MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Research Department of Bioinformatics at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
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