MOTIVATION: Circulating-free DNA (cfDNA) profiling by sequencing is an important minimally invasive protocol for monitoring the mutation profile of solid tumours in cancer patients. Since the concentration of available cfDNA is limited, sample library generation relies on multiple rounds of PCR amplification, during which the accumulation of errors results in reduced sensitivity and lower accuracy. RESULTS: We present PCR Error Correction (PEC), an algorithm to identify and correct errors in short read sequencing data. It exploits the redundancy that arises from multiple rounds of PCR amplification. PEC is particularly well suited to applications such as single-cell sequencing and circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) analysis, in which many cycles of PCR are used to generate sufficient DNA for sequencing from small amounts of starting material. When applied to ctDNA analysis, PEC significantly improves mutation calling accuracy, achieving similar levels of performance to more complex strategies that require additional protocol steps and access to calibration DNA datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PEC is available under the GPL-v3 Open Source licence, and is freely available from: https://github.com/CRUKMI-ComputationalBiology/PCR_Error_Correction.git. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: De novo transcriptome assembly is an important technique for understanding gene expression in non-model organisms. Many de novo assemblers using the de Bruijn graph of a set of the RNA sequences rely on in-memory representation of this graph. However, current methods analyse the complete set of read-derived k-mer sequence at once, resulting in the need for computer hardware with large shared memory. RESULTS: We introduce a novel approach that clusters k-mers as the first step. The clusters correspond to small sets of gene products, which can be processed quickly to give candidate transcripts. We implement the clustering step using the MapReduce approach for parallelising the analysis of large datasets, which enables the use of compute clusters. The computational task is distributed across the compute system using the industry-standard MPI protocol, and no specialised hardware is required. Using this approach, we have re-implemented the Inchworm module from the widely used Trinity pipeline, and tested the method in the context of the full Trinity pipeline. Validation tests on a range of real datasets show large reductions in the runtime and per-node memory requirements, when making use of a compute cluster. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows that MapReduce-based clustering has great potential for distributing challenging sequencing problems, without loss of accuracy. Although we have focussed on the Trinity package, we propose that such clustering is a useful initial step for other assembly pipelines.

BACKGROUND: Gene expression connectivity mapping has gained much popularity recently with a number of successful applications in biomedical research testifying its utility and promise. Previously methodological research in connectivity mapping mainly focused on two of the key components in the framework, namely, the reference gene expression profiles and the connectivity mapping algorithms. The other key component in this framework, the query gene signature, has been left to users to construct without much consensus on how this should be done, albeit it has been an issue most relevant to end users. As a key input to the connectivity mapping process, gene signature is crucially important in returning biologically meaningful and relevant results. This paper intends to formulate a standardized procedure for constructing high quality gene signatures from a user's perspective. RESULTS: We describe a two-stage process for making quality gene signatures using gene expression data as initial inputs. First, a differential gene expression analysis comparing two distinct biological states; only the genes that have passed stringent statistical criteria are considered in the second stage of the process, which involves ranking genes based on statistical as well as biological significance. We introduce a "gene signature progression" method as a standard procedure in connectivity mapping. Starting from the highest ranked gene, we progressively determine the minimum length of the gene signature that allows connections to the reference profiles (drugs) being established with a preset target false discovery rate. We use a lung cancer dataset and a breast cancer dataset as two case studies to demonstrate how this standardized procedure works, and we show that highly relevant and interesting biological connections are returned. Of particular note is gefitinib, identified as among the candidate therapeutics in our lung cancer case study. Our gene signature was based on gene expression data from Taiwan female non-smoker lung cancer patients, while there is evidence from independent studies that gefitinib is highly effective in treating women, non-smoker or former light smoker, advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients of Asian origin. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, we introduced a gene signature progression method into connectivity mapping, which enables a standardized procedure for constructing high quality gene signatures. This progression method is particularly useful when the number of differentially expressed genes identified is large, and when there is a need to prioritize them to be included in the query signature. The results from two case studies demonstrate that the approach we have developed is capable of obtaining pertinent candidate drugs with high precision.

Quantile normalization (QN) is a technique for microarray data processing and is the default normalization method in the Robust Multi-array Average (RMA) procedure, which was primarily designed for analysing gene expression data from Affymetrix arrays. Given the abundance of Affymetrix microarrays and the popularity of the RMA method, it is crucially important that the normalization procedure is applied appropriately. In this study we carried out simulation experiments and also analysed real microarray data to investigate the suitability of RMA when it is applied to dataset with different groups of biological samples. From our experiments, we showed that RMA with QN does not preserve the biological signal included in each group, but rather it would mix the signals between the groups. We also showed that the Median Polish method in the summarization step of RMA has similar mixing effect. RMA is one of the most widely used methods in microarray data processing and has been applied to a vast volume of data in biomedical research. The problematic behaviour of this method suggests that previous studies employing RMA could have been misadvised or adversely affected. Therefore we think it is crucially important that the research community recognizes the issue and starts to address it. The two core elements of the RMA method, quantile normalization and Median Polish, both have the undesirable effects of mixing biological signals between different sample groups, which can be detrimental to drawing valid biological conclusions and to any subsequent analyses. Based on the evidence presented here and that in the literature, we recommend exercising caution when using RMA as a method of processing microarray gene expression data, particularly in situations where there are likely to be unknown subgroups of samples.

With recent advances in high throughput sequencing platforms, it is possible to sequence RNA obtained from biological samples more cost-effectively and comprehensively. Due to the ubiquity of the technology, massive volumes of RNA sequence data are now being generated, and as a result the need for more efficient analysis software has become an urgent challenge.

One of the major challenges in systems biology is to understand the complex responses of a biological system to external perturbations or internal signalling depending on its biological conditions. Genome-wide transcriptomic profiling of cellular systems under various chemical perturbations allows the manifestation of certain features of the chemicals through their transcriptomic expression profiles. The insights obtained may help to establish the connections between human diseases, associated genes and therapeutic drugs. The main objective of this study was to systematically analyse cellular gene expression data under various drug treatments to elucidate drug-feature specific transcriptomic signatures. We first extracted drug-related information (drug features) from the collected textual description of DrugBank entries using text-mining techniques. A novel statistical method employing orthogonal least square learning was proposed to obtain drug-feature-specific signatures by integrating gene expression with DrugBank data. To obtain robust signatures from noisy input datasets, a stringent ensemble approach was applied with the combination of three techniques: resampling, leave-one-out cross validation, and aggregation. The validation experiments showed that the proposed method has the capacity of extracting biologically meaningful drug-feature-specific gene expression signatures. It was also shown that most of signature genes are connected with common hub genes by regulatory network analysis. The common hub genes were further shown to be related to general drug metabolism by Gene Ontology analysis. Each set of genes has relatively few interactions with other sets, indicating the modular nature of each signature and its drug-feature-specificity. Based on Gene Ontology analysis, we also found that each set of drug feature (DF)-specific genes were indeed enriched in biological processes related to the drug feature. The results of these experiments demonstrated the potential of the method for predicting certain features of new drugs using their transcriptomic profiles, providing a useful methodological framework and a valuable resource for drug development and characterization.

BACKGROUND: The previous studies of genome-wide expression patterns show that a certain percentage of genes are cell cycle regulated. The expression data has been analyzed in a number of different ways to identify cell cycle dependent genes. In this study, we pose the hypothesis that cell cycle dependent genes are considered as oscillating systems with a rhythm, i.e. systems producing response signals with period and frequency. Therefore, we are motivated to apply the theory of multivariate phase synchronization for clustering cell cycle specific genome-wide expression data. RESULTS: We propose the strategy to find groups of genes according to the specific biological process by analyzing cell cycle specific gene expression data. To evaluate the propose method, we use the modified Kuramoto model, which is a phase governing equation that provides the long-term dynamics of globally coupled oscillators. With this equation, we simulate two groups of expression signals, and the simulated signals from each group shares their own common rhythm. Then, the simulated expression data are mixed with randomly generated expression data to be used as input data set to the algorithm. Using these simulated expression data, it is shown that the algorithm is able to identify expression signals that are involved in the same oscillating process. We also evaluate the method with yeast cell cycle expression data. It is shown that the output clusters by the proposed algorithm include genes, which are closely associated with each other by sharing significant Gene Ontology terms of biological process and/or having relatively many known biological interactions. Therefore, the evaluation analysis indicates that the method is able to identify expression signals according to the specific biological process. Our evaluation analysis also indicates that some portion of output by the proposed algorithm is not obtainable by the traditional clustering algorithm with Euclidean distance or linear correlation. CONCLUSION: Based on the evaluation experiments, we draw the conclusion as follows: 1) Based on the theory of multivariate phase synchronization, it is feasible to find groups of genes, which have relevant biological interactions and/or significantly shared GO slim terms of biological process, using cell cycle specific gene expression signals. 2) Among all the output clusters by the proposed algorithm, the cluster with relatively large size has a tendency to include more known interactions than the one with relatively small size. 3) It is feasible to understand the cell cycle specific gene expression patterns as the phenomenon of collective synchronization. 4) The proposed algorithm is able to find prominent groups of genes, which are not obtainable by traditional clustering algorithm.

BACKGROUND: A reverse engineering of gene regulatory network with large number of genes and limited number of experimental data points is a computationally challenging task. In particular, reverse engineering using linear systems is an under-determined and ill conditioned problem, i.e. the amount of microarray data is limited and the solution is very sensitive to noise in the data. Therefore, the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks with large number of genes and limited number of data points requires rigorous optimization algorithm. RESULTS: This study presents a novel algorithm for reverse engineering with linear systems. The proposed algorithm is a combination of the orthogonal least squares, second order derivative for network pruning, and Bayesian model comparison. In this study, the entire network is decomposed into a set of small networks that are defined as unit networks. The algorithm provides each unit network with P(D|Hi), which is used as confidence level. The unit network with higher P(D|Hi) has a higher confidence such that the unit network is correctly elucidated. Thus, the proposed algorithm is able to locate true positive interactions using P(D|Hi), which is a unique property of the proposed algorithm. The algorithm is evaluated with synthetic and Saccharomyces cerevisiae expression data using the dynamic Bayesian network. With synthetic data, it is shown that the performance of the algorithm depends on the number of genes, noise level, and the number of data points. With Yeast expression data, it is shown that there is remarkable number of known physical or genetic events among all interactions elucidated by the proposed algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is compared with Sparse Bayesian Learning algorithm using both synthetic and Saccharomyces cerevisiae expression data sets. The comparison experiments show that the algorithm produces sparser solutions with less false positives than Sparse Bayesian Learning algorithm. CONCLUSION: From our evaluation experiments, we draw the conclusion as follows: 1) Simulation results show that the algorithm can be used to elucidate gene regulatory networks using limited number of experimental data points. 2) Simulation results also show that the algorithm is able to handle the problem with noisy data. 3) The experiment with Yeast expression data shows that the proposed algorithm reliably elucidates known physical or genetic events. 4) The comparison experiments show that the algorithm more efficiently performs than Sparse Bayesian Learning algorithm with noisy and limited number of data.