MOTIVATION: Modern biological experiments often produce candidate lists of genes presumably related to the studied phenotype. One can ask if the gene list as a whole makes sense in the context of existing knowledge: Are the genes in the list reasonably related to each other or do they look like a random assembly? There are also situations when one wants to know if two or more gene sets are closely related. Gene enrichment tests based on counting the number of genes two sets have in common are adequate if we presume that two genes are related only when they are in fact identical. If by related we mean well connected in the interaction network space, we need a new measure of relatedness for gene sets. RESULTS: We derive entropy, interaction information and mutual information for gene sets on interaction networks, starting from a simple phenomenological model of a living cell. Formally, the model describes a set of interacting linear harmonic oscillators in thermal equilibrium. Because the energy function is a quadratic form of the degrees of freedom, entropy and all other derived information quantities can be calculated exactly. We apply these concepts to estimate the probability that genes from several independent genome-wide association studies are not mutually informative; to estimate the probability that two disjoint canonical metabolic pathways are not mutually informative; and to infer relationships among human diseases based on their gene signatures. We show that the present approach is able to predict observationally validated relationships not detectable by gene enrichment methods. The converse is also true; the two methods are therefore complementary. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The functions defined in this paper are available in an R package, gsia, available for download at https://github.com/ucsd-ccbb/gsia.

Summary: With the growing availability of population-scale whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing, demand for reproducible, scalable variant analysis has spread within genomic research communities. To address this need, we introduce the Python package Variant Analysis and Prioritization (VAPr). VAPr leverages existing annotation tools ANNOVAR and MyVariant.info with MongoDB-based flexible storage and filtering functionality. It offers biologists and bioinformatics generalists easy-to-use and scalable analysis and prioritization of genomic variants from large cohort studies. Availability and implementation: VAPr is developed in Python and is available for free use and extension under the MIT License. An install package is available on PyPi at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/VAPr, while source code and extensive documentation are on GitHub at https://github.com/ucsd-ccbb/VAPr.

Motivation: Network biology is widely used to elucidate mechanisms of disease and biological processes. The ability to interact with biological networks is important for hypothesis generation and to give researchers an intuitive understanding of the data. We present visJS2jupyter, a tool designed to embed interactive networks in Jupyter notebooks to streamline network analysis and to promote reproducible research. Results: The tool provides functions for performing and visualizing useful network operations in biology, including network overlap, network propagation around a focal set of genes, and co-localization of two sets of seed genes. visJS2jupyter uses the JavaScript library vis.js to create interactive networks displayed within Jupyter notebook cells with features including drag, click, hover, and zoom. We demonstrate the functionality of visJS2jupyter applied to a biological question, by creating a network propagation visualization to prioritize risk-related genes in autism. Availability and implementation: The visJS2jupyter package is distributed under the MIT License. The source code, documentation and installation instructions are freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/ucsd-ccbb/visJS2jupyter. The package can be downloaded at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/visJS2jupyter. Contact: [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Omics Pipe (http://sulab.scripps.edu/omicspipe) is a computational framework that automates multi-omics data analysis pipelines on high performance compute clusters and in the cloud. It supports best practice published pipelines for RNA-seq, miRNA-seq, Exome-seq, Whole-Genome sequencing, ChIP-seq analyses and automatic processing of data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Omics Pipe provides researchers with a tool for reproducible, open source and extensible next generation sequencing analysis. The goal of Omics Pipe is to democratize next-generation sequencing analysis by dramatically increasing the accessibility and reproducibility of best practice computational pipelines, which will enable researchers to generate biologically meaningful and interpretable results. RESULTS: Using Omics Pipe, we analyzed 100 TCGA breast invasive carcinoma paired tumor-normal datasets based on the latest UCSC hg19 RefSeq annotation. Omics Pipe automatically downloaded and processed the desired TCGA samples on a high throughput compute cluster to produce a results report for each sample. We aggregated the individual sample results and compared them to the analysis in the original publications. This comparison revealed high overlap between the analyses, as well as novel findings due to the use of updated annotations and methods. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code for Omics Pipe is freely available on the web (https://bitbucket.org/sulab/omics_pipe). Omics Pipe is distributed as a standalone Python package for installation (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/omics_pipe) and as an Amazon Machine Image in Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud that contains all necessary third-party software dependencies and databases (https://pythonhosted.org/omics_pipe/AWS_installation.html).