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  1. Abstract

    Drug screening data from massive bulk gene expression databases can be analyzed to determine the optimal clinical application of cancer drugs. The growing amount of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data also provides insights into improving therapeutic effectiveness by helping to study the heterogeneity of drug responses for cancer cell subpopulations. Developing computational approaches to predict and interpret cancer drug response in single-cell data collected from clinical samples can be very useful. We propose scDEAL, a deep transfer learning framework for cancer drug response prediction at the single-cell level by integrating large-scale bulk cell-line data. The highlight in scDEAL involves harmonizing drug-related bulk RNA-seq data with scRNA-seq data and transferring the model trained on bulk RNA-seq data to predict drug responses in scRNA-seq. Another feature of scDEAL is the integrated gradient feature interpretation to infer the signature genes of drug resistance mechanisms. We benchmark scDEAL on six scRNA-seq datasets and demonstrate its model interpretability via three case studies focusing on drug response label prediction, gene signature identification, and pseudotime analysis. We believe that scDEAL could help study cell reprogramming, drug selection, and repurposing for improving therapeutic efficacy.

     
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  2. Abstract Motivation

    Gene expression imputation has been an essential step of the single-cell RNA-Seq data analysis workflow. Among several deep-learning methods, the debut of scGNN gained substantial recognition in 2021 for its superior performance and the ability to produce a cell–cell graph. However, the implementation of scGNN was relatively time-consuming and its performance could still be optimized.

    Results

    The implementation of scGNN 2.0 is significantly faster than scGNN thanks to a simplified close-loop architecture. For all eight datasets, cell clustering performance was increased by 85.02% on average in terms of adjusted rand index, and the imputation Median L1 Error was reduced by 67.94% on average. With the built-in visualizations, users can quickly assess the imputation and cell clustering results, compare against benchmarks and interpret the cell–cell interaction. The expanded input and output formats also pave the way for custom workflows that integrate scGNN 2.0 with other scRNA-Seq toolkits on both Python and R platforms.

    Availability and implementation

    scGNN 2.0 is implemented in Python (as of version 3.8) with the source code available at https://github.com/OSU-BMBL/scGNN2.0.

    Supplementary information

    Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

     
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  3. Abstract Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-Seq) is widely used to reveal the heterogeneity and dynamics of tissues, organisms, and complex diseases, but its analyses still suffer from multiple grand challenges, including the sequencing sparsity and complex differential patterns in gene expression. We introduce the scGNN (single-cell graph neural network) to provide a hypothesis-free deep learning framework for scRNA-Seq analyses. This framework formulates and aggregates cell–cell relationships with graph neural networks and models heterogeneous gene expression patterns using a left-truncated mixture Gaussian model. scGNN integrates three iterative multi-modal autoencoders and outperforms existing tools for gene imputation and cell clustering on four benchmark scRNA-Seq datasets. In an Alzheimer’s disease study with 13,214 single nuclei from postmortem brain tissues, scGNN successfully illustrated disease-related neural development and the differential mechanism. scGNN provides an effective representation of gene expression and cell–cell relationships. It is also a powerful framework that can be applied to general scRNA-Seq analyses. 
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  5. Abstract Motivation

    Metagenomic and metatranscriptomic analyses can provide an abundance of information related to microbial communities. However, straightforward analysis of this data does not provide optimal results, with a required integration of data types being needed to thoroughly investigate these microbiomes and their environmental interactions.

    Results

    Here, we present MetaQUBIC, an integrated biclustering-based computational pipeline for gene module detection that integrates both metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data. Additionally, we used this pipeline to investigate 735 paired DNA and RNA human gut microbiome samples, resulting in a comprehensive hybrid gene expression matrix of 2.3 million cross-species genes in the 735 human fecal samples and 155 functional enriched gene modules. We believe both the MetaQUBIC pipeline and the generated comprehensive human gut hybrid expression matrix will facilitate further investigations into multiple levels of microbiome studies.

    Availability and implementation

    The package is freely available at https://github.com/OSU-BMBL/metaqubic.

    Supplementary information

    Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

     
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  6. Abstract Motivation

    The biclustering of large-scale gene expression data holds promising potential for detecting condition-specific functional gene modules (i.e. biclusters). However, existing methods do not adequately address a comprehensive detection of all significant bicluster structures and have limited power when applied to expression data generated by RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq), especially single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) data, where massive zero and low expression values are observed.

    Results

    We present a new biclustering algorithm, QUalitative BIClustering algorithm Version 2 (QUBIC2), which is empowered by: (i) a novel left-truncated mixture of Gaussian model for an accurate assessment of multimodality in zero-enriched expression data, (ii) a fast and efficient dropouts-saving expansion strategy for functional gene modules optimization using information divergency and (iii) a rigorous statistical test for the significance of all the identified biclusters in any organism, including those without substantial functional annotations. QUBIC2 demonstrated considerably improved performance in detecting biclusters compared to other five widely used algorithms on various benchmark datasets from E.coli, Human and simulated data. QUBIC2 also showcased robust and superior performance on gene expression data generated by microarray, bulk RNA-Seq and scRNA-Seq.

    Availability and implementation

    The source code of QUBIC2 is freely available at https://github.com/OSU-BMBL/QUBIC2.

    Contact

    czhang87@iu.edu or qin.ma@osumc.edu

    Supplementary information

    Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

     
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  7. Abstract Motivation

    Mitochondria are an essential organelle in most eukaryotes. They not only play an important role in energy metabolism but also take part in many critical cytopathological processes. Abnormal mitochondria can trigger a series of human diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, multifactor disorder and Type-II diabetes. Protein submitochondrial localization enables the understanding of protein function in studying disease pathogenesis and drug design.

    Results

    We proposed a new method, SubMito-XGBoost, for protein submitochondrial localization prediction. Three steps are included: (i) the g-gap dipeptide composition (g-gap DC), pseudo-amino acid composition (PseAAC), auto-correlation function (ACF) and Bi-gram position-specific scoring matrix (Bi-gram PSSM) are employed to extract protein sequence features, (ii) Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is used to balance samples, and the ReliefF algorithm is applied for feature selection and (iii) the obtained feature vectors are fed into XGBoost to predict protein submitochondrial locations. SubMito-XGBoost has obtained satisfactory prediction results by the leave-one-out-cross-validation (LOOCV) compared with existing methods. The prediction accuracies of the SubMito-XGBoost method on the two training datasets M317 and M983 were 97.7% and 98.9%, which are 2.8–12.5% and 3.8–9.9% higher than other methods, respectively. The prediction accuracy of the independent test set M495 was 94.8%, which is significantly better than the existing studies. The proposed method also achieves satisfactory predictive performance on plant and non-plant protein submitochondrial datasets. SubMito-XGBoost also plays an important role in new drug design for the treatment of related diseases.

    Availability and implementation

    The source codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/QUST-AIBBDRC/SubMito-XGBoost/.

    Supplementary information

    Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

     
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