Binsheng Gong

SubpathwayMiner: a software package for flexible identification of pathways

With the development of high-throughput experimental techniques such as microarray, mass spectrometry and large-scale mutagenesis, there is an increasing need to automatically annotate gene sets and identify the involved pathways. Although many pathway analysis tools are developed, new tools are still needed to meet the requirements for flexible or advanced analysis purpose. Here, we developed an R-based software package (SubpathwayMiner) for flexible pathway identification. SubpathwayMiner facilitates sub-pathway identification of metabolic pathways by using pathway structure information. Additionally, SubpathwayMiner also provides more flexibility in annotating gene sets and identifying the involved pathways (entire pathways and sub-pathways): (i) SubpathwayMiner is able to provide the most up-to-date pathway analysis results for users; (ii) SubpathwayMiner supports multiple species (∼100 eukaryotes, 714 bacteria and 52 Archaea) and different gene identifiers (Entrez Gene IDs, NCBI-gi IDs, UniProt IDs, PDB IDs, etc.) in the KEGG GENE database; (iii) the system is quite efficient in cooperating with other R-based tools in biology. SubpathwayMiner is freely available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SubpathwayMiner/.

From phenotype to gene: Detecting disease-specific gene functional modules via a text-based human disease phenotype network construction

Currently, some efforts have been devoted to the text analysis of disease phenotype data, and their results indicated that similar disease phenotypes arise from functionally related genes. These related genes work together, as a functional module, to perform a desired cellular function. We constructed a text‐based human disease phenotype network and detected 82 disease‐specific gene functional modules, each corresponding to a different phenotype cluster, by means of graph‐based clustering and mapping from disease phenotype to gene. Since genes in such gene functional modules are functionally related and cause clinically similar diseases, they may share common genetic origin of their associated disease phenotypes. We believe the investigation may facilitate the ultimate understanding of the common pathophysiologic basis of associated diseases.

A robust approach based on Weibull distribution for clustering gene expression data

BackgroundClustering is a widely used technique for analysis of gene expression data. Most clustering methods group genes based on the distances, while few methods group genes according to the similarities of the distributions of the gene expression levels. Furthermore, as the biological annotation resources accumulated, an increasing number of genes have been annotated into functional categories. As a result, evaluating the performance of clustering methods in terms of the functional consistency of the resulting clusters is of great interest.ResultsIn this paper, we proposed the WDCM (Weibull Distribution-based Clustering Method), a robust approach for clustering gene expression data, in which the gene expressions of individual genes are considered as the random variables following unique Weibull distributions. Our WDCM is based on the concept that the genes with similar expression profiles have similar distribution parameters, and thus the genes are clustered via the Weibull distribution parameters. We used the WDCM to cluster three cancer gene expression data sets from the lung cancer, B-cell follicular lymphoma and bladder carcinoma and obtained well-clustered results. We compared the performance of WDCM with k-means and Self Organizing Map (SOM) using functional annotation information given by the Gene Ontology (GO). The results showed that the functional annotation ratios of WDCM are higher than those of the other methods. We also utilized the external measure Adjusted Rand Index to validate the performance of the WDCM. The comparative results demonstrate that the WDCM provides the better clustering performance compared to k-means and SOM algorithms. The merit of the proposed WDCM is that it can be applied to cluster incomplete gene expression data without imputing the missing values. Moreover, the robustness of WDCM is also evaluated on the incomplete data sets.ConclusionsThe results demonstrate that our WDCM produces clusters with more consistent functional annotations than the other methods. The WDCM is also verified to be robust and is capable of clustering gene expression data containing a small quantity of missing values.

Disease embryo development network reveals the relationship between disease genes and embryo development genes

Abstract A basic problem for contemporary biology and medicine is exploring the correlation between human disease and underlying cellular mechanisms. For a long time, several efforts were made to reveal the similarity between embryo development and disease process, but few from the system level. In this article, we used the human protein–protein interactions (PPIs), disease genes with their classifications and embryo development genes and reconstructed a human disease-embryo development network to investigate the relationship between disease genes and embryo development genes. We found that disease genes and embryo development genes are prone to connect with each other. Furthermore, diseases can be categorized into three groups according to the closeness with embryo development in gene overlapping, interacting pattern in PPI network and co-regulated by microRNAs or transcription factors. Embryo development high-related disease genes show their closeness with embryo development at least in three biological levels. But it is not for embryo development medium-related disease genes and embryo development low-related disease genes. We also found that embryo development high-related disease genes are more central than other disease genes in the human PPI network. In addition, the results show that embryo development high-related disease genes tend to be essential genes compared with other diseases’ genes. This network-based approach could provide evidence for the intricate correlation between disease process and embryo development, and help to uncover potential mechanisms of human complex diseases.

Genetic control of primary microRNA insight into cis- and trans-regulatory variations by RNA-seq.

To search for genetic regulators influencing miRNA transcript abundance, we performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify quantitative trait loci associated with primary miRNA transcript abundance (pri-miQTL) using genotype data from HapMap CEU phased data. We detected robust expression for 150 pri-miRNAs out of 1523 interrogated using RNA-seq. We have identified some pri-miRNAs that showed significant evidence for cis- (34%) and trans-pri-miQTLs (3%). Furthermore, we observed that multiple cis-pri-miQTLs, showed allele-specific expression associated with single pri-miRNA expression. Interestingly, a cis-regulatory variation influenced the expression levels of two pri-miRNAs that expressed identical mature sequences. We also observed that a single trans-regulatory variation was associated with multiple unrelated pri-miRNAs: rs292253 was associated with the expression of hsa-mir-3181, hsa-mir-3665 and hsa-mir-762. These findings revealed that the expression of pri-miRNA detected by RNA-seq can be used to identify pri-miQTLs, as an alternative method to dissect the genetic control mechanisms governing pri-miRNA expression.

Analysis of sib-pair IBD profiles and genomic context for identification of the relevant molecular signatures for alcoholism

Recent advances in SNPs that allow genome-wide profiling of complex biological phenotypes have offered the golden opportunities to unravel the high-order mechanisms and have also motivated development of the corresponding analysis strategies. Here, we design four novel comprehensive association criteria concerning both informatics of IBD statistic and genomic context. Application of these criteria along with sliding window and permutation test to 100 simulated replicates for two American populations to extract the relevant SNPs for alcoholism from sib-pair IBD profiles of pedigrees demonstrates that the proposed new approaches have successfully identified most of the simulated true loci, thus implicating that IBD statistic and genomic context could be used as the informatics for mining the underlying genes for complex human diseases. Compared with the classical Haseman-Elston method, our strategy is more efficient and simpler.

Application of a genetic algorithm — support vector machine hybrid for prediction of clinical phenotypes based on genome-wide SNP profiles of sib pairs

Large-scale genome-wide genetic profiling using markers of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has offered the opportunities to investigate the possibility of using those biomarkers for predicting genetic risks. Because of the special data structure characterized with a high dimension, signal-to-noise ratio and correlations between genes, but with a relative small sample size, the data analysis needs special strategies. We propose a robust data reduction technique based on a hybrid between genetic algorithm and support vector machine. The major goal of this hybridization is to fully exploit their respective merits (e.g., robustness to the size of solution space and capability of handling a very large dimension of features) for identification of key SNP features for risk prediction. We have applied the approach to the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 COGA data to predict affection status of a sib pair based on genome-wide SNP identical-by-decent (IBD) informatics. This application has demonstrated its potential to extract useful information from the massive SNP data.

Novel strategies to mine alcoholism-related haplotypes and genes by combining existing knowledge framework.

High-throughout single nucleotide polymorphism detection technology and the existing knowledge provide strong support for mining the disease-related haplotypes and genes. In this study, first, we apply four kinds of haplotype identification methods (Confidence Intervals, Four Gamete Tests, Solid Spine of LD and fusing method of haplotype block) into high-throughout SNP genotype data to identify blocks, then use cluster analysis to verify the effectiveness of the four methods, and select the alcoholism-related SNP haplotypes through risk analysis. Second, we establish a mapping from haplotypes to alcoholism-related genes. Third, we inquire NCBI SNP and gene databases to locate the blocks and identify the candidate genes. In the end, we make gene function annotation by KEGG, Biocarta, and GO database. We find 159 haplotype blocks, which relate to the alcoholism most possibly on chromosome 1∼22, including 227 haplotypes, of which 102 SNP haplotypes may increase the risk of alcoholism. We get 121 alcoholism-related genes and verify their reliability by the functional annotation of biology. In a word, we not only can handle the SNP data easily, but also can locate the disease-related genes precisely by combining our novel strategies of mining alcoholism-related haplotypes and genes with existing knowledge framework.

Single-nucleotide polymorphism-gene intermixed networking reveals co-linkers connected to multiple gene expression phenotypes

Gene expression profiles and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) profiles are modern data for genetic analysis. It is possible to use the two types of information to analyze the relationships among genes by some genetical genomics approaches. In this study, gene expression profiles were used as expression traits. And relationships among the genes, which were co-linked to a common SNP(s), were identified by integrating the two types of information. Further research on the co-expressions among the co-linked genes was carried out after the gene-SNP relationships were established using the Haseman-Elston sib-pair regression. The results showed that the co-expressions among the co-linked genes were significantly higher if the number of connections between the genes and a SNP(s) was more than six. Then, the genes were interconnected via one or more SNP co-linkers to construct a gene-SNP intermixed network. The genes sharing more SNPs tended to have a stronger correlation. Finally, a gene-gene network was constructed with their intensities of relationships (the number of SNP co-linkers shared) as the weights for the edges.