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Biomedical subjects

T M Murali

Publications and source records attributed to T M Murali.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Automatic layout and visualization of biclusters.

BACKGROUND: Biclustering has emerged as a powerful algorithmic tool for analyzing measurements of gene expression. A number of different methods have emerged for computing biclusters in gene expression data. Many of these algorithms may output a very large number of biclusters with varying degrees of overlap. There are no systematic methods that create a two-dimensional layout of the computed biclusters and display overlaps between them. RESULTS: We develop a novel algorithm for laying out biclusters in a two-dimensional matrix whose rows (respectively, columns) are rows (respectively, columns) of the original dataset. We display each bicluster as a contiguous submatrix in the layout. We allow the layout to have repeated rows and/or columns from the original matrix as required, but we seek a layout of the smallest size. We also develop a web-based search interface for the user to query the genes and samples of interest and visualise the layout of biclusters matching the queries. CONCLUSION: We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on gene expression data for two types of leukaemia and on protein-DNA binding data for two growth conditions in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The software implementing the layout algorithm is available at http://bioinformatics.cs.vt.edu/~murali/papers/bivoc.

Journal Article↗

Response diversity of Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes in elevated [CO2] in the field.

Free Air [CO(2)] Enrichment (FACE) allows for plant growth under fully open-air conditions of elevated [CO(2)] at concentrations expected to be reached by mid-century. We used Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes Col-0, Cvi-0, and WS to analyze changes in gene expression and metabolite profiles of plants grown in "SoyFACE" (http://www.soyface.uiuc.edu/), a system of open-air rings within which [CO(2)] is elevated to approximately 550 ppm. Data from multiple rings, comparing plants in ambient air and elevated [CO(2)], were analyzed by mixed model ANOVA, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and data-mining tools. In elevated [CO(2)], decreases in the expression of genes related to chloroplast functions characterized all lines but individual members of distinct multi-gene families were regulated differently between lines. Also, different strategies distinguished the lines with respect to the regulation of genes related to carbohydrate biosynthesis and partitioning, N-allocation and amino acid metabolism, cell wall biosynthesis, and hormone responses, irrespective of the plants' developmental status. Metabolite results paralleled reactions seen at the level of transcript expression. Evolutionary adaptation of species to their habitat and intrinsic genetic plasticity seem to determine the nature of responses to elevated [CO(2)]. Irrespective of their underlying genetic diversity, and evolutionary adaptation to different habitats, a small number of common, predominantly stress-responsive, signature transcripts appear to characterize responses of the Arabidopsis ecotypes in FACE.

Analysis of Variance↗

VIRGO: computational prediction of gene functions.

Dramatic advances in sequencing technology and sophisticated experimental assays that interrogate the cell, combined with the public availability of the resulting data, herald the era of systems biology. However, the biological functions of more than 40% of the genes in sequenced genomes are unknown, posing a fundamental barrier to progress in systems biology. The large scale and diversity of available data requires the development of techniques that can automatically utilize these datasets to make quantified and robust predictions of gene function that can be experimentally verified. We present a service called the VIRtual Gene Ontology (VIRGO) that (i) constructs a functional linkage network (FLN) from gene expression and molecular interaction data, (ii) labels genes in the FLN with their functional annotations in the Gene Ontology and (iii) systematically propagates these labels across the FLN in order to precisely predict the functions of unlabelled genes. VIRGO assigns confidence estimates to predicted functions so that a biologist can prioritize predictions for further experimental study. For each prediction, VIRGO also provides an informative 'propagation diagram' that traces the flow of information in the FLN that led to the prediction. VIRGO is available at http://whipple.cs.vt.edu:8080/virgo.

Algorithms↗

XcisClique: analysis of regulatory bicliques.

BACKGROUND: Modeling of cis-elements or regulatory motifs in promoter (upstream) regions of genes is a challenging computational problem. In this work, set of regulatory motifs simultaneously present in the promoters of a set of genes is modeled as a biclique in a suitably defined bipartite graph. A biologically meaningful co-occurrence of multiple cis-elements in a gene promoter is assessed by the combined analysis of genomic and gene expression data. Greater statistical significance is associated with a set of genes that shares a common set of regulatory motifs, while simultaneously exhibiting highly correlated gene expression under given experimental conditions. METHODS: XcisClique, the system developed in this work, is a comprehensive infrastructure that associates annotated genome and gene expression data, models known cis-elements as regular expressions, identifies maximal bicliques in a bipartite gene-motif graph; and ranks bicliques based on their computed statistical significance. Significance is a function of the probability of occurrence of those motifs in a biclique (a hypergeometric distribution), and on the new sum of absolute values statistic (SAV) that uses Spearman correlations of gene expression vectors. SAV is a statistic well-suited for this purpose as described in the discussion. RESULTS: XcisClique identifies new motif and gene combinations that might indicate as yet unidentified involvement of sets of genes in biological functions and processes. It currently supports Arabidopsis thaliana and can be adapted to other organisms, assuming the existence of annotated genomic sequences, suitable gene expression data, and identified regulatory motifs. A subset of Xcis Clique functionalities, including the motif visualization component MotifSee, source code, and supplementary material are available at https://bioinformatics.cs.vt.edu/xcisclique/.

Algorithms↗

Whole-genome annotation by using evidence integration in functional-linkage networks.

The advent of high-throughput biology has catalyzed a remarkable improvement in our ability to identify new genes. A large fraction of newly discovered genes have an unknown functional role, particularly when they are specific to a particular lineage or organism. These genes, currently labeled "hypothetical," might support important biological cell functions and could potentially serve as targets for medical, diagnostic, or pharmacogenomic studies. An important challenge to the scientific community is to associate these newly predicted genes with a biological function that can be validated by experimental screens. In the absence of sequence or structural homology to known genes, we must rely on advanced biotechnological methods, such as DNA chips and protein-protein interaction screens as well as computational techniques to assign putative functions to these genes. In this article, we propose an effective methodology for combining biological evidence obtained in several high-throughput experimental screens and integrating this evidence in a way that provides consistent functional assignments to hypothetical genes. We use the visualization method of propagation diagrams to illustrate the flow of functional evidence that supports the functional assignments produced by the algorithm. Our results contain a number of predictions and furnish strong evidence that integration of functional information is indeed a promising direction for improving the accuracy and robustness of functional genomics.

Chromosome Mapping↗

Gene expression module discovery using gibbs sampling.

Recent advances in high throughput profiling of gene expression have catalyzed an explosive growth in functional genomics aimed at the elucidation of genes that are differentially expressed in various tissue or cell types across a range of experimental conditions. These studies can lead to the identification of diagnostic genes, classification of genes into functional categories, association of genes with regulatory pathways, and clustering of genes into modules that are potentially co-regulated by a group of transcription factors. Traditional clustering methods such as hierarchical clustering or principal component analysis are difficult to deploy effectively for several of these tasks since genes rarely exhibit similar expression pattern across a wide range of conditions. Bi-clustering of gene expression data is a promising methodology for identification of gene groups that show a coherent expression profile across a subset of conditions. This methodology can be a first step towards the discovery of co-regulated and co-expressed genes or modules. Although bi-clustering (also called block clustering) was introduced in statistics in 1974 few robust and efficient solutions exist for extracting gene expression modules in microarray data. In this paper, we propose a simple but promising new approach for bi-clustering based on a Gibbs sampling paradigm. Our algorithm is implemented in the program GEMS (Gene Expression Module Sampler). GEMS has been tested on synthetic data generated to evaluate the effect of noise on the performance of the algorithm as well as on published leukemia datasets. In our preliminary studies comparing GEMS with other bi-clustering software we show that GEMS is a reliable, flexible and computationally efficient approach for bi-clustering gene expression data.

Cluster Analysis↗

RankGene: identification of diagnostic genes based on expression data.

RankGene is a program for analyzing gene expression data and computing diagnostic genes based on their predictive power in distinguishing between different types of samples. The program integrates into one system a variety of popular ranking criteria, ranging from the traditional t-statistic to one-dimensional support vector machines. This flexibility makes RankGene a useful tool in gene expression analysis and feature selection.

Algorithms↗

Extracting conserved gene expression motifs from gene expression data.

We propose a representation for gene expression data called conserved gene expression motifs or XMOTIFs. A gene's expression level is conserved across a set of samples if the gene is expressed with the same abundance in all the samples. A conserved gene expression motif is a subset of genes that is simultaneously conserved across a subset of samples. We present a computational technique to discover large conserved gene motifs that cover all the samples and classes in the data. When applied to published data sets representing different cancers or disease outcomes, our algorithm constructs XMOTIFS that distinguish between the various classes.

Algorithms↗