Congrats to Sean for submitting the final paper from his PhD thesis to bioRxiv!
eQTL networks review
Congrats to Sean for the publication of his review article “eQTLs as causal instruments for the reconstruction of hormone linked gene networks”! The review is part of a special issue “Insights in Systems Endocrinology: 2021” in Frontiers in Endocrinology.
Molecular Omics cover article
Congratulations to Adriaan for having his article (and art work!) selected for the cover of the April issue of Molecular Omics!
Causal network inference preprint
Adriaan’s paper “Comparison between instrumental variable and mediation-based methods for reconstructing causal gene networks in yeast” has been posted on biorXiv. In this paper we used Findr to compare several methods for causal inference from genomics and transcriptomics data, using a recently published dataset of 1,012 segregants from a cross between two budding yeast strains.
Frontiers Genetics paper
Lingfei’s paper, “High-dimensional Bayesian network inference from systems genetics data using genetic node ordering” has been published in Frontiers in Genetics, in a Special Topic on Machine Learning and Network-Driven Integrative Genomics.
In this paper, we present a highly efficient approach for reconstructing Bayesian gene regulatory networks when prior information for the inclusion of edges exists or can be inferred from the available data. The method is implemented in the Findr software.
RSOS paper
Lingfei’s paper “Accurate wisdom of the crowd from unsupervised dimension reduction” has been published in Royal Society Open Science. In this paper it is shown that wisdom of the crowd, the collective intelligence derived from responses of multiple individuals to the same questions, is analogous to one-dimensional unsupervised dimension reduction in machine learning. This means that many of-the-shelf dimension reduction methods, such as good old PCA, can be repurposed as crowd-wisdom methods, usually with (much) better performance than existing default crowd-wisdom methods. Perhaps one of the more surprising results concerned the classification of skin images as being cancerous or not. As part of the hype surrounding deep learning, it was recently found that a deep neural network trained on 130,000 images was better at classifying a test set of 111 skin images than 21 individual dermatologists. However, we found that by doing a simple PCA of the predictions of these 21 dermatologists, they collectively outperformed the deep neural network. As The Economist put it in their recent ad, “not all intelligence is artificial”. In fact some of it is collective.
Bayesian network preprint
A new preprint, “High-dimensional Bayesian network inference from systems genetics data using genetic node ordering”, is available on bioRxiv. Bayesian networks are statistical models for gene regulatory networks, and their inference from large-scale omics data is a major problem in systems genetics. In this paper we present an algorithm to solve this problem that uses causal inference, topological sorting and variable selection, and that is much more efficient than traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The algorithm is implemented in the Findr and lassopv software packages.
GRN book chapters
We contributed two chapters to a Methods in Molecular Biology book on Gene Regulatory Networks: a chapter by Lingfei about the use of Findr for the inference of transcriptome-wide causal networks, and a chapter by Pau about the use of lemon-tree for the inference of differential module networks.
Congrats and goodbye Lingfei
Congratulations and goodbye to Lingfei who has joined Ramnik Xavier’s lab at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks for the good times and all the hard work, and all the best in your new position!
Enhancer-based causal inference preprint
There is a lot of research showing that genetic information in combination with gene expression data can be used to predict causal interactions between genes, on the basis that genetic variation among individuals causes gene expression variation but not vice versa (this PLOS CompBio article is a contribution to the field from our group and has links to earlier work). Anagha Joshi’s group asked if this principle could be extended to other contexts, and in a joint preprint “Causal gene regulatory network inference using enhancer activity as a causal anchor” an affirmative answer is given: variation of epigenetic activity at enhancer elements across multiple cell types or experimental treatments together with gene expression data also predicts causal interactions. The accompanying statistical methods have been implemented in our Findr software.