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- Gustafsson, Mika, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Gene Expression Prediction by Soft Integration and the Elastic Net : Best Performance of the DREAM3 Gene Expression Challenge
- 2010
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Ingår i: PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 5:2, s. e9134-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: To predict gene expressions is an important endeavour within computational systems biology. It can both be a way to explore how drugs affect the system, as well as providing a framework for finding which genes are interrelated in a certain process. A practical problem, however, is how to assess and discriminate among the various algorithms which have been developed for this purpose. Therefore, the DREAM project invited the year 2008 to a challenge for predicting gene expression values, and here we present the algorithm with best performance.Methodology/Principal Findings: We develop an algorithm by exploring various regression schemes with different model selection procedures. It turns out that the most effective scheme is based on least squares, with a penalty term of a recently developed form called the “elastic net”. Key components in the algorithm are the integration of expression data from other experimental conditions than those presented for the challenge and the utilization of transcription factor binding data for guiding the inference process towards known interactions. Of importance is also a cross-validation procedure where each form of external data is used only to the extent it increases the expected performance.Conclusions/Significance: Our algorithm proves both the possibility to extract information from large-scale expression data concerning prediction of gene levels, as well as the benefits of integrating different data sources for improving the inference. We believe the former is an important message to those still hesitating on the possibilities for computational approaches, while the latter is part of an important way forward for the future development of the field of computational systems biology.
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| 2. |
- Gustafsson, Mika, 1977-
(författare)
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Gene networks from high-throughput data : Reverse engineering and analysis
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Experimental innovations starting in the 1990’s leading to the advent of high-throughput experiments in cellular biology have made it possible to measure thousands of genes simultaneously at a modest cost. This enables the discovery of new unexpected relationships between genes in addition to the possibility of falsify existing. To benefit as much as possible from these experiments the new inter disciplinary research field of systems biology have materialized. Systems biology goes beyond the conventional reductionist approach and aims at learning the whole system under the assumption that the system is greater than the sum of its parts. One emerging enterprise in systems biology is to use the high-throughput data to reverse engineer the web of gene regulatory interactions governing the cellular dynamics. This relatively new endeavor goes further than clustering genes with similar expression patterns and requires the separation of cause of gene expression from the effect. Despite the rapid data increase we then face the problem of having too few experiments to determine which regulations are active as the number of putative interactions has increased dramatic as the number of units in the system has increased. One possibility to overcome this problem is to impose more biologically motivated constraints. However, what is a biological fact or not is often not obvious and may be condition dependent. Moreover, investigations have suggested several statistical facts about gene regulatory networks, which motivate the development of new reverse engineering algorithms, relying on different model assumptions. As a result numerous new reverse engineering algorithms for gene regulatory networks has been proposed. As a consequent, there has grown an interest in the community to assess the performance of different attempts in fair trials on “real” biological problems. This resulted in the annually held DREAM conference which contains computational challenges that can be solved by the prosing researchers directly, and are evaluated by the chairs of the conference after the submission deadline.This thesis contains the evolution of regularization schemes to reverse engineer gene networks from high-throughput data within the framework of ordinary differential equations. Furthermore, to understand gene networks a substantial part of it also concerns statistical analysis of gene networks. First, we reverse engineer a genome-wide regulatory network based solely on microarray data utilizing an extremely simple strategy assuming sparseness (LASSO). To validate and analyze this network we also develop some statistical tools. Then we present a refinement of the initial strategy which is the algorithm for which we achieved best performer at the DREAM2 conference. This strategy is further refined into a reverse engineering scheme which also can include external high-throughput data, which we confirm to be of relevance as we achieved best performer in the DREAM3 conference as well. Finally, the tools we developed to analyze stability and flexibility in linearized ordinary differential equations representing gene regulatory networks is further discussed.
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| 3. |
- Hörnquist, Michael, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Stability and Flexibility from a System Analysis of Gene RegulatoryNetworks Based on Ordinary Differential Equations
- 2011
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Ingår i: The Open Bioinformatics Journal. - : Bentham Open. - 1875-0362. ; 5, s. 26-33
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The inference of large-scale gene regulatory networks from high-throughput data sets has revealed a diverse picture of only partially overlapping descriptions. Nevertheless, several properties in the organization of these networks are recurrent, such as hubs, a modular structure and certain motifs. Several authors have recently claimed cell systems to be stable against perturbations and random errors, but still able to rapidly switch between different states from specific stimuli. Since inferred mathematical models of large-scale systems need to be extremely simple to avoid overfitting, these two features are hard to attain simultaneously for a model. Here we review and discuss possible measures of how system stability and flexibility may be manifested and measured for linearized models based on systems of ordinary differential equations. Furthermore, we review how the network properties mentioned above together with the nature of the interactions contribute to these systems level properties. It turns out that the presence of repressed hubs, together with other phenomena of topological nature such as motifs and modules, contribute to the overall stability and/or flexibility of the model.
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