Bayesian Inference of Gene Regulatory Network

During the past two decades, computational analysis has become paramount for biological research. Advancements in high-throughput methods and computational tools resulted in the generation of large amounts of data from different omics fields (multi-omics), such as genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. This plethora of large scale and diverse omics data is being driven by the understanding that a single-omic type does not provide adequate information and integrative analysis of multi-omics data is optimal to gain sufficiently meaningful insights into the actual biological mechanisms. Although various open-source tools have been developed for this purpose, multi-omics data integration and analysis are still beset by a number of problems, including software compatibility, complex parameter selection and creation of functional pipelines with multiple steps of analyses. In this work we present GenOptics, a novel visual analytics platform that aims to facilitate the integration and subsequent analysis of diverse multi-omics datasets as well as meta-data (e.g., clinical data), through a fully interactive environment. The platform comprises of two separate parts. The first incorporates asynchronous analyses of Next-Generation Sequencing raw data, including RNA-, Whole exome-, and ChIP-Seq, using workflows implemented with the Common Workflow Language (doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.3115156.v2) and Docker containers to automate software installation and confer cross-platform portability. The second part constitutes the analytical platform itself, designed to facilitate the execution of robust bioinformatics analyses by life scientists with minimal or no knowledge of programming. GenOptics constitutes an open source (https://genoptics.github.io/), computational biology platform for novel pattern and biomarker detection.

Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) inference from gene expression data is a hard task and a widely addressed challenge. GRNs can be represented as Boolean models similarly to digital circuits. Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP), often used for designing circuits, can thus be adopted in the inference of GRNs. The main CGP operator for generating candidate designs is mutation, making its choice important for obtaining good results. Although there are many mutation operators for CGP, to the best of our knowledge, there is no analysis of them in the GRN inference problem. An evaluation of the Single ActiveMutation (SAM) and the Semantically-Oriented Mutation Operator (SOMO)is performed here for GRNs inference. Also, a combination of both operators is proposed. We use a benchmark single-cell RNA-Sequencingtime series data and its evaluation pipeline to measure the performance of the approaches. The experiments indicate that (i) combining SOMOand SAM provides the best results, and (ii) the results obtained by the proposal are competitive with those from state-of-the-art methods.

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are crucial for understanding gene regulation and cellular processes. Inferring GRNs helps uncover regulatory pathways, shedding light on the regulation and development of cellular processes. With the rise of high-throughput sequencing and advancements in computational technology, computational models have emerged as cost-effective alternatives to traditional experimental studies. Moreover, the surge in ChIP-seq data for TF-DNA binding has catalyzed the development of graph neural network (GNN)-based methods, greatly advancing GRN inference capabilities. However, most existing GNN-based methods suffer from the inability to capture long-distance structural semantic correlations due to transitive interactions. In this paper, we introduce a novel GNN-based model named Hierarchical Graph Transformer with Contrastive Learning for GRN (HGTCGRN) inference. HGTCGRN excels at capturing structural semantics using a hierarchical graph Transformer, which introduces a series of gene family nodes representing gene functions as virtual nodes to interact with nodes in the GRNS. These semantic-aware virtual-node embeddings are aggregated to produce node representations with varying emphasis. Additionally, we leverage gene ontology information to construct gene interaction networks for contrastive learning optimization of GRNs. Experimental results demonstrate that HGTCGRN achieves superior performance in GRN inference.

To address one of the most challenging ecosystems issues at the cellular level, this paper surveys the fuzzy methods used in gene regulatory networks (GRNs) inference. GRNs represent causal relationships between genes that have a direct influence on the life and the development of living organisms, and provide a useful contribution to the understanding of the cellular functions as well as the mechanisms of diseases. The ecosystems impacted by GRN inference span various levels from cell to society -- globally.

With the advent of high throughput genome-wide assays it has become possible to simultaneously measure multiple types of genomic data. Several projects like TCGA, ICGC, NCI-60 has generated comprehensive, multi-dimensional maps of the key genomic changes like MiRNA, MRNA, proteomics etc. from cancer samples[2,4]. These genomic data can be used for classifying tumour types[5]. Integrative analysis of these data from multiple sources can potentially provide additional biological insights, but methods to do any such analysis are lacking. One of the widely used solutions to handle high dimension data is by removing redundant information in the integrated sample. Most of the expressed genes are overlapped and can be projected onto lower dimension, and then be used to classify different tumor types, without the loss of any/much information. Sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) [1], a supervised dimension reduction approach, can be ideal to achieve such a goal. In this paper, we propose a novel integrative SDR method that can reduce dimensions of multiple data types simultaneously while sharing common latent structures to improve prediction and interpretation. In particular, we extend the sliced inverse regression (SIR) technique, a major SDR method, to integrate multiple omits data for simultaneous dimension reduction. SIR is a supervised dimension reduction method that assumes that the outcome variable Y depends on the predictor variable X through d unknown linear combinations of the predictor[3]. The predictor variable is replaced by its projection into a lower dimension subspace of the predictor space without the loss of information. The aim is to find the intersection of all the subspaces δ called the central susbspace (CS) of the predictor space satisfying the property Y ╨ X| Pδ X. To integrate multiple types of data, we propose and implement a new integrative sufficient dimension reduction method extending SIR[3], called integrative SIR. The main idea is that we take into account all the multi-omics data information simultaneously while finding a basis matrix for each data type with some sharing latent structures. Finally, we get d dimension data which is much smaller than the original data dimension. The reduced dimension d was achieved by cross validation. To demonstrate the integrated analysis of multi-omics data, we applied and compared conventional SIR and integrative SIR to analyze MRNA, MiRNA and proteomics expression profile of a subset of cell lines from the NCI-60 panel. The data used is taken from [6]. The outcomes we have to classify are CNS, Leukemia and Melanoma tumor types. We pre-screened 400 variables from each data type with the criteria of high variance. To find classification error, we performed random forest classification after we applied to each method with leave-one-out cross-validation. As a result, we found out that integrative SIR leads to less classification error as compared to conventional SIR. To summarize, we proposed a new integrative SIR method, a supervised dimension reduction technique for integrative analysis of multi-omics data types. Unlike conventional SDR methods, the new approach can reduce the dimensions of multiple omics data simultaneously while sharing common latent structures across data types without losing any information in prediction. By efficiently capturing the common information, our numerical study shows that integrative SIR classifies tumor types more accurately as compared to conventional SDR methods.

A survey of the methodological process of modeling, inference, and evaluation of gene regulatory networks using scRNA-Seq data.

Genes encode proteins, some of which in turn regulate other genes. Such interactions make up a gene regulatory network. The understanding and unraveling of gene regulatory networks have been proven very useful in disease diagnosis and genomic drug design. Due to the complexity of gene regulatory networks, the completely understanding of their dynamics is difficult to achieve only through biological experiments without any computational aids. As a consequence, computational models for gene regulatory networks are indispensable. Recently a wide variety of different computational models have been proposed for inferring gene regulatory networks. This paper surveys some of computational models for inferring large gene regulatory networks, in particular, Boolean network model, differential/ difference equation models, and state-space models. Some advantages and disadvantages of these models are commented on. Some criteria for validating the inferred gene regulatory networks are also discussed from the bioinformatics perspective. Finally, several directions of the future work for modeling gene regulatory networks are proposed.

Recent advances in measurement technologies, particularly single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), have revolutionized our ability to acquire large amounts of omics-level data on cellular states. As measurement techniques evolve, there has been an increasing need for data analysis methodologies, especially those focused on cell-type identification and inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). We have developed a new method named BootCellNet, which employs smoothing and resampling to infer GRNs. Using the inferred GRNs, BootCellNet further infers the minimum dominating set (MDS), a set of genes that determines the dynamics of the entire network. We have demonstrated that BootCellNet robustly infers GRNs and their MDSs from scRNA-seq data and facilitates unsupervised identification of cell clusters using scRNA-seq datasets of peripheral blood mononuclear cells and hematopoiesis. It has also identified COVID-19 patient-specific cells and their potential regulatory transcription factors. BootCellNet not only identifies cell types in an unsupervised and explainable way but also provides insights into the characteristics of identified cell types through the inference of GRNs and MDS.

Inference of gene regulatory network from microarray data is one of the most important issues in bioinformatics. Several algorithms have been introduced for this problem, but they cannot give accurate results in case of time series gene expression data. Here, we propose an algorithm that predicts the gene regulatory network more accurately than the previous methods. A new method finds the relationship between a pair of genes by time-shifting the time series data of one gene against another when we compare the patterns of the gene pair. In addition, we increase the accuracy of the prediction method by filtering out the interactions that cannot exist in real biological network. We tested the algorithm to several simulated data which are based on realistic enzyme kinetics system, and evaluated the effectiveness of our algorithm. Results show that the present algorithm significantly improves the accuracy of the inference of gene regulatory network.

Objective: Breast cancer is a common tumor and has a high mortality rate. Gene regulatory networks(GRNs) can genetically facilitate targeted therapies for this disease. Impact Statement: This study proposes a new method to infer GRNs. This new method combining genetic modules and convolutional neural networks is presented to infer GRNs from the RNA sequencing data of breast cancer. Introduction: GRNs play an essential role in many disease treatments. Previous studies showed that GRNs will accelerate tumor therapy. However, most of the existing network inference methods are based on large-scale gene collections, which ignore the characteristics of different tumors. Methods: In this work, weighted gene coexpression network analysis was deployed to screen key genes and gene modules. The gene regulatory associations in gene modules were then transformed into 2-dimensional histogram types. A convolutional neural network was chosen as the main framework to fit the gene regulatory types and infer the GRN. Results: The method integrates genetic data analysis and deep learning perspectives to screen key genes and predict GRNs among key genes. The key genes screened were validated by multiple methods, and the inferred gene regulatory associations were widely validated in real datasets. Conclusion: The method can be used as an auxiliary tool with the potential to predict key genes and the GRNs of key genes. It has the potential to facilitate the therapeutic process and targeted therapy for breast cancer.

In this study, in order to deal with the noise and uncertainty in gene expression data, learning networks, especially Bayesian networks, that have the ability to use prior knowledge, were used to infer gene regulatory network. Learning networks are methods that have the structure of the network and a learning process to obtain relationships. One of the methods which have been used for measuring the relationship between genes is the correlation metrics, but the high correlated genes not necessarily mean that they have causal effect on each other. Studies on common methods in inference of gene regulatory networks are yet to pay attention to their biological importance and as such, predictions by these methods are less accurate in terms of biological significance. Hence, in the proposed method, genes with high correlation were identified in one cluster using clustering, and the existence of edge between the genes in the cluster was prevented. Finally, after the Bayesian network modeling, based on knowledge gained from clustering, the refining phase and improving regulatory interactions using biological correlation were done. In order to show the efficiency, the proposed method has been compared with several common methods in this area including GENIE3 and BMALR. The results of the evaluation indicate that the proposed method recognized regulatory relations in Bayesian modeling process well, due to using of biological knowledge which is hidden in the data collection, and is able to recognize gene regulatory networks align with important methods in this field.

In this chapter, a novel gene regulatory network gene regulatory network inference algorithm based on the fuzzy logic network fuzzy logic network is proposed and tested. The algorithm is intuitive and robust. The key motivation for this algorithm is that genes with regulatory relationships can be modeled via fuzzy logic, and the degrees of regulations can be represented as the accumulated distance during a period of time intervals. One unique feature of this algorithm is that it makes very limited prior assumptions concerning the modeling; hence the algorithm is categorized as a data-driven algorithm data-driven algorithm. As a non-parametric model, the algorithm is very useful when only limited a priori knowledge on the target microarray exists. Another characteristic of this algorithm is that the time-series microarray data have been treated as a dynamic gene regulatory network gene regulatory network, and the fuzzification of gene expression values makes the algorithm more agreeable to reality. We have deduced the dynamic properties of the FLN using the anneal approximation, and dynamic equations of the FLN have been analyzed. Based upon previous investigation results that in yeast protein-protein networks, as well as in the Internet and social networks, the distribution of connectivity follows the Zipf’s law, the criteria of parameter quantifications for the algorithm have been achieved. The algorithm was applied on the yeast cell-cycle dataset from Stanford Saccharomyces cerevisiae database which produced pleasing results. The computation also showed that a triplet search is suitable and efficient for the inference of gene regulatory networks. The chapter is organized as follows: first, the broader context of gene regulatory networks research is addressed. Then the definition of the FLN is given, and the dynamic properties of the FLN are deduced using the annealed approximation annealed approximation in Sect. FLNTheory. Combined with the Zipf’s law, the parameter quantification guidelines are achieved at the end of this section. In Sect. AlgorithmDesign, the algorithm is illustrated in detail with its data-driven rationale. Then, the algorithm’s inference results on Saccharomyces cerevisiae dataset are presented and analyzed in Sect. ComputationResults. Future research work with the algorithm is discussed at the end of this chapter.

Biological tissues are composed of distinct microenvironments that spatially orchestrate gene expression and cell identity. However, the regulatory principles governing domain-specific cellular functions remain poorly understood due to the lack of effective methods for mapping gene regulatory networks (GRNs) in situ . To address this gap, we introduce STARNet, a representation learning approach that leverages heterogeneous hypergraph modeling of spatial transcriptomic and epigenomic data to resolve tissue-domain-specific regulatory interactions. By integrating graph neural networks with contrastive learning in a self-supervised framework, STARNet learns unified embeddings that preserve both multi-modal molecular features and anatomical spatial context, enabling accurate and domain-resolved GRN reconstruction within complex tissues. Benchmarking on both simulated and real datasets demonstrates that STARNet achieves state-of-the-art performance. We further demonstrate its broad applicability across diverse biological contexts, including neural development, genetic disease risk, and drug-induced developmental toxicity. In the mouse brain, it delineates region-specific regulatory networks and reconstructs spatiotemporal programs underlying neural stem cell differentiation. In human genetics, it provides a mechanistic link between genotypes and phenotypes by showing how genome-wide association study (GWAS) variants for complex diseases perturb hippocampus-specific GRNs. In developmental toxicology, STARNet reveals that drug-induced disruptions of GRNs in defined embryonic regions underlie tissue-specific vulnerability. Collectively, STARNet offers a powerful and versatile framework for resolving the spatial regulatory logic of complex tissues, providing multi-angle insights into tissue patterning, development, and disease mechanisms.

The increasing amount of data produced by current high-throughput technologies allows for a better understanding of disease-related phenotypic traits and yet the molecular mechanisms stabilizing them are predominantly unknown. The inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) has potential to significantly enhance the discovery of disease-related and context-specific interactomes [1]. However, GRN inference remains a major challenge due to the combinatorial explosion of solutions and the underdetermined nature of the problem, which can be overcome by adding more context-specific information, such as gene expression, chromatin conformation or covalent modifications. Even though integrating multiple layers of information has been attempted before, all methods are tailored to specific needs [2,3]. In this work an Integer Linear Programming approach is proposed for inferring context-specific Boolean GRNs. In order to guide the optimization to a more reliable GRN, both context-independent and context-specific information is encoded into constraints. In contrast to previous methods that explore the search space using heuristics, the proposed methodology guarantees global optimality, significantly reduced runtime, and scalability. The optimization-based approach was validated on various human cell lines and outperformed previous methods in all cases when comparing the amount of retained cell-line specific ChIP-Seq interactions. We believe that our modular framework will significantly enhance the discovery of disease motifs and drug target prediction by providing more reliable context-specific GRNs.

It is an effective strategy to use both genetic perturbation data and gene expression data to infer regulatory networks that aims to improve the detection accuracy of the regulatory relationships among genes. Based on both types of data, the genetic regulatory networks can be accurately modeled by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). In this paper, a linear regression (LR) model is formulated based on the SEM, and a novel iterative scheme using Bayesian inference is proposed to estimate the parameters of the LR model (LRBI). Comparative evaluations of LRBI with other two algorithms, the Adaptive Lasso (AL-Based) and the Sparsity-aware Maximum Likelihood (SML), are also presented. Simulations show that LRBI has significantly better performance than AL-Based, and overperforms SML in terms of power of detection. Applying the LRBI algorithm to experimental data, we inferred the interactions in a network of 35 yeast genes. An open-source program of the LRBI algorithm is freely available upon request.