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Ren J, Gao Q, Zhou X, Chen L, Guo W, Feng K, Huang T, Cai YD. Identification of key gene expression associated with quality of life after recovery from COVID-19. Med Biol Eng Comput 2024; 62:1031-1048. [PMID: 38123886 DOI: 10.1007/s11517-023-02988-8] [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: 07/06/2023] [Accepted: 11/30/2023] [Indexed: 12/23/2023]
Abstract
Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) is a persistent complication of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection that includes symptoms, such as fatigue, cognitive impairment, and respiratory distress. These symptoms severely affect the quality of life of patients after their recovery from COVID-19. In this study, a group of machine learning algorithms analyzed the whole blood RNA-seq data from patients with different PASC levels. The purpose of this analysis was to identify the gene markers associated with PASC and the special expression patterns for different PASC levels. By comparing the quality of life of patients after the acute phase of COVID-19 and before the disease, samples in the dataset were divided into three groups, namely, "Better," "The Same," and "Worse." Each patient was represented by the expression levels of 58,929 genes. The machine learning-based workflow included six feature-ranking algorithms, incremental feature selection (IFS), and four classification algorithms. The feature ranking algorithms were in charge of assessing feature importance, whereas IFS with classification algorithms were used to extract essential genes and to construct efficient classifiers and classification rules. The expression of top genes in the results was associated with the immune response to viral infection, which is supported by the published literature. For example, patients with low CCDC18 expression and high CPED1 expression had good quality of life, whereas those with low CDC16 expression had poor quality of life.
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Affiliation(s)
- JingXin Ren
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China
| | - Qian Gao
- Department of Pharmacy, Shanghai Children's Medical Center, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200127, China
| | - XianChao Zhou
- Center for Single-Cell Omics, School of Public Health, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, 200030, China
| | - KaiYan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou, 510507, China
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China.
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Ma Q, Chen L, Feng K, Guo W, Huang T, Cai YD. Exploring Prognostic Gene Factors in Breast Cancer via Machine Learning. Biochem Genet 2024:10.1007/s10528-024-10712-w. [PMID: 38383836 DOI: 10.1007/s10528-024-10712-w] [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: 08/12/2023] [Accepted: 01/21/2024] [Indexed: 02/23/2024]
Abstract
Breast cancer remains the most prevalent cancer in women. To date, its underlying molecular mechanisms have not been fully uncovered. The determination of gene factors is important to improve our understanding on breast cancer, which can correlate the specific gene expression and tumor staging. However, the knowledge in this regard is still far from complete. Thus, this study aimed to explore these knowledge gaps by analyzing existing gene expression profile data from 3149 breast cancer samples, where each sample was represented by the expression of 19,644 genes and classified into Nottingham histological grade (NHG) classes (Grade 1, 2, and 3). To this end, a machine learning-based framework was designed. First, the profile data were analyzed by using seven feature ranking algorithms to evaluate the importance of features (genes). Seven feature lists were generated, each of which sorted features in accordance with feature importance evaluated from a special aspect. Then, the incremental feature selection method was applied to each list to determine essential features for classification and building efficient classifiers. Consequently, overlapping genes, such as AURKA, CBX2, and MYBL2, were deemed as potentially related to breast cancer malignancy and prognosis, indicating that such genes were identified to be important by multiple feature ranking algorithms. In addition, the study formulated classification rules to reflect special gene expression patterns for three NHG classes. Some genes and rules were analyzed and supported by recent literature, providing new references for studying breast cancer.
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Affiliation(s)
- QingLan Ma
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China
| | - KaiYan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou, 510507, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, 200030, China
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China.
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3
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Chen L, Xu J, Zhou Y. PDATC-NCPMKL: Predicting drug's Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes based on network consistency projection and multiple kernel learning. Comput Biol Med 2024; 169:107862. [PMID: 38150886 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107862] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/18/2023] [Revised: 11/19/2023] [Accepted: 12/17/2023] [Indexed: 12/29/2023]
Abstract
The development and discovery of new drugs is time-consuming and needs lots of human and material resources. Therefore, discovery of novel effects of existing drugs is an important alternative way, which can accelerate the process of designing "new" drugs. The anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system recommended by World Health Organization (WHO) is a basic research area in this regard. A novel ATC code of an existing drug suggests its novel effects. Some computational models have been proposed, which can predict the drug-ATC code associations. However, their performance is not very high. There still exist spaces for improvement. In this study, a new recommendation system (named PDATC-NCPMKL), which incorporated network consistency projection and multi-kernel learning, was designed to identify drug-ATC code associations. For drugs or ATC codes, several kernels were constructed, which were fused by a multiple kernel learning method and an additional kernel integration scheme. To enhance the performance, the drug-ATC code association adjacency matrix was reformulated by a variant of weighted K nearest known neighbors (WKNKN). The reformulated adjacency matrix, drug and ATC code kernels were fed into network consistency projection to generate the association score matrix. The proposed recommendation system was tested on the ATC codes at the second, third and fourth levels in drug ATC classification system using ten-fold cross-validation. The results indicated that all AUROC and AUPR values were close to or exceeded 0.96. Such performance was higher than some existing computational models. Some additional tests were conducted to prove the utility of adjacency matrix reformulation and to analyze the importance of drug and ATC code kernels.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China.
| | - Jing Xu
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China.
| | - Yubin Zhou
- Department of Thoracic Surgery, Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610072, China.
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Ren J, Zhou X, Huang K, Chen L, Guo W, Feng K, Huang T, Cai YD. Identification of key genes associated with persistent immune changes and secondary immune activation responses induced by influenza vaccination after COVID-19 recovery by machine learning methods. Comput Biol Med 2024; 169:107883. [PMID: 38157776 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107883] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/06/2023] [Revised: 11/27/2023] [Accepted: 12/18/2023] [Indexed: 01/03/2024]
Abstract
COVID-19 is hypothesized to exert enduring effects on the immune systems of patients, leading to alterations in immune-related gene expression. This study aimed to scrutinize the persistent implications of SARS-CoV-2 infection on gene expression and its influence on subsequent immune activation responses. We designed a machine learning-based approach to analyze transcriptomic data from both healthy individuals and patients who had recovered from COVID-19. Patients were categorized based on their influenza vaccination status and then compared with healthy controls. The initial sample set encompassed 86 blood samples from healthy controls and 72 blood samples from recuperated COVID-19 patients prior to influenza vaccination. The second sample set included 123 blood samples from healthy controls and 106 blood samples from recovered COVID-19 patients who had been vaccinated against influenza. For each sample, the dataset captured expression levels of 17,060 genes. Above two sample sets were first analyzed by seven feature ranking algorithms, yielding seven feature lists for each dataset. Then, each list was fed into the incremental feature selection method, incorporating three classic classification algorithms, to extract essential genes, classification rules and build efficient classifiers. The genes and rules were analyzed in this study. The main findings included that NEXN and ZNF354A were highly expressed in recovered COVID-19 patients, whereas MKI67 and GZMB were highly expressed in patients with secondary immune activation post-COVID-19 recovery. These pivotal genes could provide valuable insights for future health monitoring of COVID-19 patients and guide the creation of continued treatment regimens.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jingxin Ren
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China.
| | - XianChao Zhou
- Center for Single-Cell Omics, School of Public Health, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China.
| | - Ke Huang
- School of Life Science and Technology, Shanghai Tech University, Shanghai, 201210, China.
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China.
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, 200030, China.
| | - KaiYan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou, 510507, China.
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China; CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China.
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Chen L, Zhang C, Xu J. PredictEFC: a fast and efficient multi-label classifier for predicting enzyme family classes. BMC Bioinformatics 2024; 25:50. [PMID: 38291384 PMCID: PMC10829269 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-024-05665-1] [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: 06/29/2023] [Accepted: 01/22/2024] [Indexed: 02/01/2024] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Enzymes play an irreplaceable and important role in maintaining the lives of living organisms. The Enzyme Commission (EC) number of an enzyme indicates its essential functions. Correct identification of the first digit (family class) of the EC number for a given enzyme is a hot topic in the past twenty years. Several previous methods adopted functional domain composition to represent enzymes. However, it would lead to dimension disaster, thereby reducing the efficiency of the methods. On the other hand, most previous methods can only deal with enzymes belonging to one family class. In fact, several enzymes belong to two or more family classes. RESULTS In this study, a fast and efficient multi-label classifier, named PredictEFC, was designed. To construct this classifier, a novel feature extraction scheme was designed for processing functional domain information of enzymes, which counting the distribution of each functional domain entry across seven family classes in the training dataset. Based on this scheme, each training or test enzyme was encoded into a 7-dimenion vector by fusing its functional domain information and above statistical results. Random k-labelsets (RAKEL) was adopted to build the classifier, where random forest was selected as the base classification algorithm. The two tenfold cross-validation results on the training dataset shown that the accuracy of PredictEFC can reach 0.8493 and 0.8370. The independent test on two datasets indicated the accuracy values of 0.9118 and 0.8777. CONCLUSION The performance of PredictEFC was slightly lower than the classifier directly using functional domain composition. However, its efficiency was sharply improved. The running time was less than one-tenth of the time of the classifier directly using functional domain composition. In additional, the utility of PredictEFC was superior to the classifiers using traditional dimensionality reduction methods and some previous methods, and this classifier can be transplanted for predicting enzyme family classes of other species. Finally, a web-server available at http://124.221.158.221/ was set up for easy usage.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, People's Republic of China.
| | - Chenyu Zhang
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, People's Republic of China
| | - Jing Xu
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, People's Republic of China
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Zhou B, Ran B, Chen L. A GraphSAGE-based model with fingerprints only to predict drug-drug interactions. MATHEMATICAL BIOSCIENCES AND ENGINEERING : MBE 2024; 21:2922-2942. [PMID: 38454713 DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2024130] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/09/2024]
Abstract
Drugs are an effective way to treat various diseases. Some diseases are so complicated that the effect of a single drug for such diseases is limited, which has led to the emergence of combination drug therapy. The use multiple drugs to treat these diseases can improve the drug efficacy, but it can also bring adverse effects. Thus, it is essential to determine drug-drug interactions (DDIs). Recently, deep learning algorithms have become popular to design DDI prediction models. However, most deep learning-based models need several types of drug properties, inducing the application problems for drugs without these properties. In this study, a new deep learning-based model was designed to predict DDIs. For wide applications, drugs were first represented by commonly used properties, referred to as fingerprint features. Then, these features were perfectly fused with the drug interaction network by a type of graph convolutional network method, GraphSAGE, yielding high-level drug features. The inner product was adopted to score the strength of drug pairs. The model was evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation, resulting in an AUROC of 0.9704 and AUPR of 0.9727. Such performance was better than the previous model which directly used drug fingerprint features and was competitive compared with some other previous models that used more drug properties. Furthermore, the ablation tests indicated the importance of the main parts of the model, and we analyzed the strengths and limitations of a model for drugs with different degrees in the network. This model identified some novel DDIs that may bring expected benefits, such as the combination of PEA and cannabinol that may produce better effects. DDIs that may cause unexpected side effects have also been discovered, such as the combined use of WIN 55,212-2 and cannabinol. These DDIs can provide novel insights for treating complex diseases or avoiding adverse drug events.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bo Zhou
- Institute of Wound Prevention and Treatment, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Shanghai 201318, China
- School of Basic Medical Sciences, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Shanghai 201318, China
| | - Bing Ran
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
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7
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Ding S, Liao H, Huang F, Chen L, Guo W, Feng K, Huang T, Cai YD. Analyzing domain features of small proteins using a machine-learning method. Proteomics 2024:e2300302. [PMID: 38258387 DOI: 10.1002/pmic.202300302] [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: 08/06/2023] [Revised: 01/14/2024] [Accepted: 01/15/2024] [Indexed: 01/24/2024]
Abstract
Small proteins (SPs) are a unique group of proteins that play crucial roles in many important biological processes. Exploring the biological function of SPs is necessary. In this study, the InterPro tool and the maximum correlation method were utilized to analyze functional domains of SPs. The purpose was to identify important functional domains that can indicate the essential differences between small and large protein sequences. First, the small and large proteins were represented by their functional domains via a one-hot scheme. Then, the MaxRel method was adopted to evaluate the relationships between each domain and the target variable, indicating small or large protein. The top 36 domain features were selected for further investigation. Among them, 14 were deemed to be highly related to SPs because they were annotated to SPs more frequently than large proteins. We found the involvement of functional domains, such as ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme/RWD-like, nuclear transport factor 2 domain, and alpha subunit of guanine nucleotide-binding protein (G-protein) in regulating the biological function of SPs. The involvement of these domains has been confirmed by other recent studies. Our findings indicate that protein functional domains may regulate small protein-related functions and predict their biological activity.
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Affiliation(s)
- ShiJian Ding
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China
| | | | - FeiMing Huang
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, China
| | - KaiYan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou, China
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China
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Chen L, Qu R, Liu X. Improved multi-label classifiers for predicting protein subcellular localization. MATHEMATICAL BIOSCIENCES AND ENGINEERING : MBE 2024; 21:214-236. [PMID: 38303420 DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2024010] [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] [Indexed: 02/03/2024]
Abstract
Protein functions are closely related to their subcellular locations. At present, the prediction of protein subcellular locations is one of the most important problems in protein science. The evident defects of traditional methods make it urgent to design methods with high efficiency and low costs. To date, lots of computational methods have been proposed. However, this problem is far from being completely solved. Recently, some multi-label classifiers have been proposed to identify subcellular locations of human, animal, Gram-negative bacterial and eukaryotic proteins. These classifiers adopted the protein features derived from gene ontology information. Although they provided good performance, they can be further improved by adopting more powerful machine learning algorithms. In this study, four improved multi-label classifiers were set up for identification of subcellular locations of the above four protein types. The random k-labelsets (RAKEL) algorithm was used to tackle proteins with multiple locations, and random forest was used as the basic prediction engine. All classifiers were tested by jackknife test, indicating their high performance. Comparisons with previous classifiers further confirmed the superiority of the proposed classifiers.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Ruyun Qu
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Xintong Liu
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
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Lin X, Ma Q, Chen L, Guo W, Huang Z, Huang T, Cai YD. Identifying genes associated with resistance to KRAS G12C inhibitors via machine learning methods. Biochim Biophys Acta Gen Subj 2023; 1867:130484. [PMID: 37805078 DOI: 10.1016/j.bbagen.2023.130484] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/29/2023] [Revised: 10/02/2023] [Accepted: 10/04/2023] [Indexed: 10/09/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND Targeted therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, greatly improving patient outcomes and quality of life. Lung cancer, specifically non-small cell lung cancer, is frequently driven by the G12C mutation at the KRAS locus. The development of KRAS inhibitors has been a breakthrough in the field of cancer research, given the crucial role of KRAS mutations in driving tumor growth and progression. However, over half of patients with cancer bypass inhibition show limited response to treatment. The mechanisms underlying tumor cell resistance to this treatment remain poorly understood. METHODS To address above gap in knowledge, we conducted a study aimed to elucidate the differences between tumor cells that respond positively to KRAS (G12C) inhibitor therapy and those that do not. Specifically, we analyzed single-cell gene expression profiles from KRAS G12C-mutant tumor cell models (H358, H2122, and SW1573) treated with KRAS G12C (ARS-1620) inhibitor, which contained 4297 cells that continued to proliferate under treatment and 3315 cells that became quiescent. Each cell was represented by the expression levels on 8687 genes. We then designed an innovative machine learning based framework, incorporating seven feature ranking algorithms and four classification algorithms to identify essential genes and establish quantitative rules. RESULTS Our analysis identified some top-ranked genes, including H2AFZ, CKS1B, TUBA1B, RRM2, and BIRC5, that are known to be associated with the progression of multiple cancers. CONCLUSION Above genes were relevant to tumor cell resistance to targeted therapy. This study provides important insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying tumor cell resistance to KRAS inhibitor treatment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiandong Lin
- Laboratory of Radiation Oncology and Radiobiology, Clinical Oncology School of Fujian Medical University and Fujian Cancer Hospital, Fuzhou 350014, China.
| | - QingLan Ma
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai 200030, China
| | - Zhiyi Huang
- College of Chemistry, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350000, China
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China; CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China.
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China.
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Chen L, Zhao X. PCDA-HNMP: Predicting circRNA-disease association using heterogeneous network and meta-path. MATHEMATICAL BIOSCIENCES AND ENGINEERING : MBE 2023; 20:20553-20575. [PMID: 38124565 DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2023909] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/23/2023]
Abstract
Increasing amounts of experimental studies have shown that circular RNAs (circRNAs) play important regulatory roles in human diseases through interactions with related microRNAs (miRNAs). CircRNAs have become new potential disease biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Predicting circRNA-disease association (CDA) is of great significance for exploring the pathogenesis of complex diseases, which can improve the diagnosis level of diseases and promote the targeted therapy of diseases. However, determination of CDAs through traditional clinical trials is usually time-consuming and expensive. Computational methods are now alternative ways to predict CDAs. In this study, a new computational method, named PCDA-HNMP, was designed. For obtaining informative features of circRNAs and diseases, a heterogeneous network was first constructed, which defined circRNAs, mRNAs, miRNAs and diseases as nodes and associations between them as edges. Then, a deep analysis was conducted on the heterogeneous network by extracting meta-paths connecting to circRNAs (diseases), thereby mining hidden associations between various circRNAs (diseases). These associations constituted the meta-path-induced networks for circRNAs and diseases. The features of circRNAs and diseases were derived from the aforementioned networks via mashup. On the other hand, miRNA-disease associations (mDAs) were employed to improve the model's performance. miRNA features were yielded from the meta-path-induced networks on miRNAs and circRNAs, which were constructed from the meta-paths connecting miRNAs and circRNAs in the heterogeneous network. A concatenation operation was adopted to build the features of CDAs and mDAs. Such representations of CDAs and mDAs were fed into XGBoost to set up the model. The five-fold cross-validation yielded an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9846, which was better than those of some existing state-of-the-art methods. The employment of mDAs can really enhance the model's performance and the importance analysis on meta-path-induced networks shown that networks produced by the meta-paths containing validated CDAs provided the most important contributions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Xiaoyu Zhao
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
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11
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Yang Y, Zhang Y, Ren J, Feng K, Li Z, Huang T, Cai Y. Identification of Colon Immune Cell Marker Genes Using Machine Learning Methods. Life (Basel) 2023; 13:1876. [PMID: 37763280 PMCID: PMC10532943 DOI: 10.3390/life13091876] [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: 07/30/2023] [Revised: 08/24/2023] [Accepted: 09/04/2023] [Indexed: 09/29/2023] Open
Abstract
Immune cell infiltration that occurs at the site of colon tumors influences the course of cancer. Different immune cell compositions in the microenvironment lead to different immune responses and different therapeutic effects. This study analyzed single-cell RNA sequencing data in a normal colon with the aim of screening genetic markers of 25 candidate immune cell types and revealing quantitative differences between them. The dataset contains 25 classes of immune cells, 41,650 cells in total, and each cell is expressed by 22,164 genes at the expression level. They were fed into a machine learning-based stream. The five feature ranking algorithms (last absolute shrinkage and selection operator, light gradient boosting machine, Monte Carlo feature selection, minimum redundancy maximum relevance, and random forest) were first used to analyze the importance of gene features, yielding five feature lists. Then, incremental feature selection and two classification algorithms (decision tree and random forest) were combined to filter the most important genetic markers from each list. For different immune cell subtypes, their marker genes, such as KLRB1 in CD4 T cells, RPL30 in B cell IGA plasma cells, and JCHAIN in IgG producing B cells, were identified. They were confirmed to be differentially expressed in different immune cells and involved in immune processes. In addition, quantitative rules were summarized by using the decision tree algorithm to distinguish candidate immune cell types. These results provide a reference for exploring the cell composition of the colon cancer microenvironment and for clinical immunotherapy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yong Yang
- Qianwei Hospital of Jilin Province, Changchun 130012, China;
| | - Yuhang Zhang
- Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA;
| | - Jingxin Ren
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China;
| | - Kaiyan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou 510507, China;
| | - Zhandong Li
- College of Biological and Food Engineering, Jilin Engineering Normal University, Changchun 130052, China;
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
| | - Yudong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China;
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12
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Ren JX, Gao Q, Zhou XC, Chen L, Guo W, Feng KY, Lu L, Huang T, Cai YD. Identification of Gene Markers Associated with COVID-19 Severity and Recovery in Different Immune Cell Subtypes. BIOLOGY 2023; 12:947. [PMID: 37508378 PMCID: PMC10376631 DOI: 10.3390/biology12070947] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/02/2023] [Revised: 06/20/2023] [Accepted: 06/29/2023] [Indexed: 07/30/2023]
Abstract
As COVID-19 develops, dynamic changes occur in the patient's immune system. Changes in molecular levels in different immune cells can reflect the course of COVID-19. This study aims to uncover the molecular characteristics of different immune cell subpopulations at different stages of COVID-19. We designed a machine learning workflow to analyze scRNA-seq data of three immune cell types (B, T, and myeloid cells) in four levels of COVID-19 severity/outcome. The datasets for three cell types included 403,700 B-cell, 634,595 T-cell, and 346,547 myeloid cell samples. Each cell subtype was divided into four groups, control, convalescence, progression mild/moderate, and progression severe/critical, and each immune cell contained 27,943 gene features. A feature analysis procedure was applied to the data of each cell type. Irrelevant features were first excluded according to their relevance to the target variable measured by mutual information. Then, four ranking algorithms (last absolute shrinkage and selection operator, light gradient boosting machine, Monte Carlo feature selection, and max-relevance and min-redundancy) were adopted to analyze the remaining features, resulting in four feature lists. These lists were fed into the incremental feature selection, incorporating three classification algorithms (decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, and random forest) to extract key gene features and construct classifiers with superior performance. The results confirmed that genes such as PFN1, RPS26, and FTH1 played important roles in SARS-CoV-2 infection. These findings provide a useful reference for the understanding of the ongoing effect of COVID-19 development on the immune system.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jing-Xin Ren
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Qian Gao
- Department of Pharmacy, Shanghai Children's Medical Center, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200127, China
| | - Xiao-Chao Zhou
- Center for Single-Cell Omics, School of Public Health, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM), Shanghai 200025, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai 200030, China
| | - Kai-Yan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou 510507, China
| | - Lin Lu
- Department of Radiology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY 10032, USA
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
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13
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Chen L, Chen K, Zhou B. Inferring drug-disease associations by a deep analysis on drug and disease networks. MATHEMATICAL BIOSCIENCES AND ENGINEERING : MBE 2023; 20:14136-14157. [PMID: 37679129 DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2023632] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 10.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 09/09/2023]
Abstract
Drugs, which treat various diseases, are essential for human health. However, developing new drugs is quite laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. Although investments into drug development have greatly increased over the years, the number of drug approvals each year remain quite low. Drug repositioning is deemed an effective means to accelerate the procedures of drug development because it can discover novel effects of existing drugs. Numerous computational methods have been proposed in drug repositioning, some of which were designed as binary classifiers that can predict drug-disease associations (DDAs). The negative sample selection was a common defect of this method. In this study, a novel reliable negative sample selection scheme, named RNSS, is presented, which can screen out reliable pairs of drugs and diseases with low probabilities of being actual DDAs. This scheme considered information from k-neighbors of one drug in a drug network, including their associations to diseases and the drug. Then, a scoring system was set up to evaluate pairs of drugs and diseases. To test the utility of the RNSS, three classic classification algorithms (random forest, bayes network and nearest neighbor algorithm) were employed to build classifiers using negative samples selected by the RNSS. The cross-validation results suggested that such classifiers provided a nearly perfect performance and were significantly superior to those using some traditional and previous negative sample selection schemes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Kaiyu Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Bo Zhou
- Shanghai University of Medicine & Health Sciences, Shanghai 201318, China
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14
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Ma QL, Huang FM, Guo W, Feng KY, Huang T, Cai YD. Machine Learning Classification of Time since BNT162b2 COVID-19 Vaccination Based on Array-Measured Antibody Activity. Life (Basel) 2023; 13:1304. [PMID: 37374086 DOI: 10.3390/life13061304] [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: 04/26/2023] [Revised: 05/26/2023] [Accepted: 05/29/2023] [Indexed: 06/29/2023] Open
Abstract
Vaccines trigger an immunological response that includes B and T cells, with B cells producing antibodies. SARS-CoV-2 immunity weakens over time after vaccination. Discovering key changes in antigen-reactive antibodies over time after vaccination could help improve vaccine efficiency. In this study, we collected data on blood antibody levels in a cohort of healthcare workers vaccinated for COVID-19 and obtained 73 antigens in samples from four groups according to the duration after vaccination, including 104 unvaccinated healthcare workers, 534 healthcare workers within 60 days after vaccination, 594 healthcare workers between 60 and 180 days after vaccination, and 141 healthcare workers over 180 days after vaccination. Our work was a reanalysis of the data originally collected at Irvine University. This data was obtained in Orange County, California, USA, with the collection process commencing in December 2020. British variant (B.1.1.7), South African variant (B.1.351), and Brazilian/Japanese variant (P.1) were the most prevalent strains during the sampling period. An efficient machine learning based framework containing four feature selection methods (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, light gradient boosting machine, Monte Carlo feature selection, and maximum relevance minimum redundancy) and four classification algorithms (decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, random forest, and support vector machine) was designed to select essential antibodies against specific antigens. Several efficient classifiers with a weighted F1 value around 0.75 were constructed. The antigen microarray used for identifying antibody levels in the coronavirus features ten distinct SARS-CoV-2 antigens, comprising various segments of both nucleocapsid protein (NP) and spike protein (S). This study revealed that S1 + S2, S1.mFcTag, S1.HisTag, S1, S2, Spike.RBD.His.Bac, Spike.RBD.rFc, and S1.RBD.mFc were most highly ranked among all features, where S1 and S2 are the subunits of Spike, and the suffixes represent the tagging information of different recombinant proteins. Meanwhile, the classification rules were obtained from the optimal decision tree to explain quantitatively the roles of antigens in the classification. This study identified antibodies associated with decreased clinical immunity based on populations with different time spans after vaccination. These antibodies have important implications for maintaining long-term immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qing-Lan Ma
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Fei-Ming Huang
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai 200030, China
| | - Kai-Yan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou 510507, China
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
| | - Yu-Dong Cai
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
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15
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Xu Y, Ma Q, Ren J, Chen L, Guo W, Feng K, Zeng Z, Huang T, Cai Y. Using Machine Learning Methods in Identifying Genes Associated with COVID-19 in Cardiomyocytes and Cardiac Vascular Endothelial Cells. Life (Basel) 2023; 13:life13041011. [PMID: 37109540 PMCID: PMC10146712 DOI: 10.3390/life13041011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/10/2023] [Revised: 04/02/2023] [Accepted: 04/08/2023] [Indexed: 04/29/2023] Open
Abstract
Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) not only causes respiratory system damage, but also imposes strain on the cardiovascular system. Vascular endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes play an important role in cardiac function. The aberrant expression of genes in vascular endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes can lead to cardiovascular diseases. In this study, we sought to explain the influence of respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection on the gene expression levels of vascular endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes. We designed an advanced machine learning-based workflow to analyze the gene expression profile data of vascular endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes from patients with COVID-19 and healthy controls. An incremental feature selection method with a decision tree was used in building efficient classifiers and summarizing quantitative classification genes and rules. Some key genes, such as MALAT1, MT-CO1, and CD36, were extracted, which exert important effects on cardiac function, from the gene expression matrix of 104,182 cardiomyocytes, including 12,007 cells from patients with COVID-19 and 92,175 cells from healthy controls, and 22,438 vascular endothelial cells, including 10,812 cells from patients with COVID-19 and 11,626 cells from healthy controls. The findings reported in this study may provide insights into the effect of COVID-19 on cardiac cells and further explain the pathogenesis of COVID-19, and they may facilitate the identification of potential therapeutic targets.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yaochen Xu
- Department of Mathematics, School of Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Qinglan Ma
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Jingxin Ren
- School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Lei Chen
- College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China
| | - Wei Guo
- Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (SJTUSM) & Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai 200030, China
| | - Kaiyan Feng
- Department of Computer Science, Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College, Guangzhou 510507, China
| | - Zhenbing Zeng
- Department of Mathematics, School of Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
| | - Tao Huang
- Bio-Med Big Data Center, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
- CAS Key Laboratory of Tissue Microenvironment and Tumor, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
| | - Yudong Cai
- Department of Mathematics, School of Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
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