More Like this

1. Minnow : a principled framework for rapid simulation of dscRNA-seq data at the read level

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz351  

   Sarkar, Hirak ; Srivastava, Avi ; Patro, Rob ( July 2019 , Bioinformatics)

   With the advancements of high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing protocols, there has been a rapid increase in the tools available to perform an array of analyses on the gene expression data that results from such studies. For example, there exist methods for pseudo-time series analysis, differential cell usage, cell-type detection RNA-velocity in single cells, etc. Most analysis pipelines validate their results using known marker genes (which are not widely available for all types of analysis) and by using simulated data from gene-count-level simulators. Typically, the impact of using different read-alignment or unique molecular identifier (UMI) deduplication methods has not been widely explored. Assessments based on simulation tend to start at the level of assuming a simulated count matrix, ignoring the effect that different approaches for resolving UMI counts from the raw read data may produce. Here, we present minnow, a comprehensive sequence-level droplet-based single-cell RNA-sequencing (dscRNA-seq) experiment simulation framework. Minnow accounts for important sequence-level characteristics of experimental scRNA-seq datasets and models effects such as polymerase chain reaction amplification, cellular barcodes (CB) and UMI selection and sequence fragmentation and sequencing. It also closely matches the gene-level ambiguity characteristics that are observed in real scRNA-seq experiments. Using minnow, we explore the performance of some common processing pipelines to produce gene-by-cell count matrices from droplet-bases scRNA-seq data, demonstrate the effect that realistic levels of gene-level sequence ambiguity can have on accurate quantification and show a typical use-case of minnow in assessing the output generated by different quantification pipelines on the simulated experiment.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

   more » « less
2. Accurately modeling biased random walks on weighted networks using node2vec+

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btad047  

   Liu, Renming ; Hirn, Matthew ; Krishnan, Arjun ; Martelli, ed., Pier Luigi ( January 2023 , Bioinformatics)

   Accurately representing biological networks in a low-dimensional space, also known as network embedding, is a critical step in network-based machine learning and is carried out widely using node2vec, an unsupervised method based on biased random walks. However, while many networks, including functional gene interaction networks, are dense, weighted graphs, node2vec is fundamentally limited in its ability to use edge weights during the biased random walk generation process, thus under-using all the information in the network.

   Here, we present node2vec+, a natural extension of node2vec that accounts for edge weights when calculating walk biases and reduces to node2vec in the cases of unweighted graphs or unbiased walks. Using two synthetic datasets, we empirically show that node2vec+ is more robust to additive noise than node2vec in weighted graphs. Then, using genome-scale functional gene networks to solve a wide range of gene function and disease prediction tasks, we demonstrate the superior performance of node2vec+ over node2vec in the case of weighted graphs. Notably, due to the limited amount of training data in the gene classification tasks, graph neural networks such as GCN and GraphSAGE are outperformed by both node2vec and node2vec+.

   The data and code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/krishnanlab/node2vecplus_benchmarks. All additional data underlying this article are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7007164.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

   more » « less
3. Few shot domain adaptation for in situ macromolecule structural classification in cryoelectron tomograms

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa671  

   Yu, Liangyong ; Li, Ran ; Zeng, Xiangrui ; Wang, Hongyi ; Jin, Jie ; Ge, Yang ; Jiang, Rui ; Xu, Min ( July 2020 , Bioinformatics)

   Elofsson, Arne (Ed.)

   Abstract Motivation Cryoelectron tomography (cryo-ET) visualizes structure and spatial organization of macromolecules and their interactions with other subcellular components inside single cells in the close-to-native state at submolecular resolution. Such information is critical for the accurate understanding of cellular processes. However, subtomogram classification remains one of the major challenges for the systematic recognition and recovery of the macromolecule structures in cryo-ET because of imaging limits and data quantity. Recently, deep learning has significantly improved the throughput and accuracy of large-scale subtomogram classification. However, often it is difficult to get enough high-quality annotated subtomogram data for supervised training due to the enormous expense of labeling. To tackle this problem, it is beneficial to utilize another already annotated dataset to assist the training process. However, due to the discrepancy of image intensity distribution between source domain and target domain, the model trained on subtomograms in source domain may perform poorly in predicting subtomogram classes in the target domain. Results In this article, we adapt a few shot domain adaptation method for deep learning-based cross-domain subtomogram classification. The essential idea of our method consists of two parts: (i) take full advantage of the distribution of plentiful unlabeled target domain data, and (ii) exploit the correlation between the whole source domain dataset and few labeled target domain data. Experiments conducted on simulated and real datasets show that our method achieves significant improvement on cross domain subtomogram classification compared with baseline methods. Availability and implementation Software is available online https://github.com/xulabs/aitom. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. 

   more » « less
4. iDINGO—integrative differential network analysis in genomics with Shiny application

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btx750  

   Class, Caleb A. ; Ha, Min Jin ; Baladandayuthapani, Veerabhadran ; Do, Kim-Anh ; Berger, ed., Bonnie ( November 2017 , Bioinformatics)

   Differential network analysis is an important way to understand network rewiring involved in disease progression and development. Building differential networks from multiple ‘omics data provides insight into the holistic differences of the interactive system under different patient-specific groups. DINGO was developed to infer group-specific dependencies and build differential networks. However, DINGO and other existing tools are limited to analyze data arising from a single platform, and modeling each of the multiple ‘omics data independently does not account for the hierarchical structure of the data.

   We developed the iDINGO R package to estimate group-specific dependencies and make inferences on the integrative differential networks, considering the biological hierarchy among the platforms. A Shiny application has also been developed to facilitate easier analysis and visualization of results, including integrative differential networks and hub gene identification across platforms.

   R package is available on CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/iDINGO) and Shiny application at https://github.com/MinJinHa/iDINGO.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

   more » « less
5. ACTIVA : realistic single-cell RNA-seq generation with automatic cell-type identification using introspective variational autoencoders

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac095  

   Heydari, A. Ali ; Davalos, Oscar A. ; Zhao, Lihong ; Hoyer, Katrina K. ; Sindi, Suzanne S. ; Mathelier, ed., Anthony ( February 2022 , Bioinformatics)

   Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) technologies allow for measurements of gene expression at a single-cell resolution. This provides researchers with a tremendous advantage for detecting heterogeneity, delineating cellular maps or identifying rare subpopulations. However, a critical complication remains: the low number of single-cell observations due to limitations by rarity of subpopulation, tissue degradation or cost. This absence of sufficient data may cause inaccuracy or irreproducibility of downstream analysis. In this work, we present Automated Cell-Type-informed Introspective Variational Autoencoder (ACTIVA): a novel framework for generating realistic synthetic data using a single-stream adversarial variational autoencoder conditioned with cell-type information. Within a single framework, ACTIVA can enlarge existing datasets and generate specific subpopulations on demand, as opposed to two separate models [such as single-cell GAN (scGAN) and conditional scGAN (cscGAN)]. Data generation and augmentation with ACTIVA can enhance scRNAseq pipelines and analysis, such as benchmarking new algorithms, studying the accuracy of classifiers and detecting marker genes. ACTIVA will facilitate analysis of smaller datasets, potentially reducing the number of patients and animals necessary in initial studies.

   We train and evaluate models on multiple public scRNAseq datasets. In comparison to GAN-based models (scGAN and cscGAN), we demonstrate that ACTIVA generates cells that are more realistic and harder for classifiers to identify as synthetic which also have better pair-wise correlation between genes. Data augmentation with ACTIVA significantly improves classification of rare subtypes (more than 45% improvement compared with not augmenting and 4% better than cscGAN) all while reducing run-time by an order of magnitude in comparison to both models.

   The codes and datasets are hosted on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5879639). Tutorials are available at https://github.com/SindiLab/ACTIVA.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

   more » « less