| 1. |
- Jörnsten, Rebecka, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Network modeling of the transcriptional effects of copy number aberrations in glioblastoma
- 2011
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Ingår i: Molecular Systems Biology. - : EMBO. - 1744-4292. ; 7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- DNA copy number aberrations (CNAs) are a hallmark of cancer genomes. However, little is known about how such changes affect global gene expression. We develop a modeling framework, EPoC (Endogenous Perturbation analysis of Cancer), to (1) detect disease-driving CNAs and their effect on target mRNA expression, and to (2) stratify cancer patients into long- and short-term survivors. Our method constructs causal network models of gene expression by combining genome-wide DNA- and RNA-level data. Prognostic scores are obtained from a singular value decomposition of the networks. By applying EPoC to glioblastoma data from The Cancer Genome Atlas consortium, we demonstrate that the resulting network models contain known disease-relevant hub genes, reveal interesting candidate hubs, and uncover predictors of patient survival. Targeted validations in four glioblastoma cell lines support selected predictions, and implicate the p53-interacting protein Necdin in suppressing glioblastoma cell growth. We conclude that large-scale network modeling of the effects of CNAs on gene expression may provide insights into the biology of human cancer. Free software in MATLAB and R is provided.
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| 2. |
- Padhan, Narendra, et al.
(författare)
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High sensitivity isoelectric focusing to establish a signaling biomarker for the diagnosis of human colorectal cancer
- 2016
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Ingår i: BMC Cancer. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1471-2407 .- 1471-2407. ; 16
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: The progression of colorectal cancer (CRC) involves recurrent amplifications/mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and downstream signal transducers of the Ras pathway, KRAS and BRAF. Whether genetic events predicted to result in increased and constitutive signaling indeed lead to enhanced biological activity is often unclear and, due to technical challenges, unexplored. Here, we investigated proliferative signaling in CRC using a highly sensitive method for protein detection. The aim of the study was to determine whether multiple changes in proliferative signaling in CRC could be combined and exploited as a "complex biomarker" for diagnostic purposes. Methods: We used robotized capillary isoelectric focusing as well as conventional immunoblotting for the comprehensive analysis of epidermal growth factor receptor signaling pathways converging on extracellular regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2), AKT, phospholipase C gamma 1 (PLC gamma 1) and c-SRC in normal mucosa compared with CRC stage II and IV. Computational analyses were used to test different activity patterns for the analyzed signal transducers. Results: Signaling pathways implicated in cell proliferation were differently dysregulated in CRC and, unexpectedly, several were downregulated in disease. Thus, levels of activated ERK1 (pERK1), but not pERK2, decreased in stage II and IV while total ERK1/2 expression remained unaffected. In addition, c-SRC expression was lower in CRC compared with normal tissues and phosphorylation on the activating residue Y418 was not detected. In contrast, PLC gamma 1 and AKT expression levels were elevated in disease. Immunoblotting of the different signal transducers, run in parallel to capillary isoelectric focusing, showed higher variability and lower sensitivity and resolution. Computational analyses showed that, while individual signaling changes lacked predictive power, using the combination of changes in three signaling components to create a "complex biomarker" allowed with very high accuracy, the correct diagnosis of tissues as either normal or cancerous. Conclusions: We present techniques that allow rapid and sensitive determination of cancer signaling that can be used to differentiate colorectal cancer from normal tissue.
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| 3. |
- Tjärnberg, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Optimal Sparsity Criteria for Network Inference
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of Computational Biology. - : Mary Ann Liebert Inc. - 1066-5277 .- 1557-8666. ; 20:5, s. 398-408
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Gene regulatory network inference (that is, determination of the regulatory interactions between a set of genes) provides mechanistic insights of central importance to research in systems biology. Most contemporary network inference methods rely on a sparsity/regularization coefficient, which we call zeta (zeta), to determine the degree of sparsity of the network estimates, that is, the total number of links between the nodes. However, they offer little or no advice on how to select this sparsity coefficient, in particular, for biological data with few samples. We show that an empty network is more accurate than estimates obtained for a poor choice of zeta. In order to avoid such poor choices, we propose a method for optimization of zeta, which maximizes the accuracy of the inferred network for any sparsity-dependent inference method and data set. Our procedure is based on leave-one-out cross-optimization and selection of the zeta value that minimizes the prediction error. We also illustrate the adverse effects of noise, few samples, and uninformative experiments on network inference as well as our method for optimization of zeta. We demonstrate that our zeta optimization method for two widely used inference algorithms-Glmnet and NIR-gives accurate and informative estimates of the network structure, given that the data is informative enough.
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