Calculating the Statistical Significance of Changes in Pathway Activity From Gene Expression Data
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Jörg Rahnenführer
, Francisco S Domingues , Jochen Maydt and Thomas Lengauer
We present a statistical approach to scoring changes in activity of metabolic pathways from gene expression data. The method identifies the biologically relevant pathways with corresponding statistical significance. Based on gene expression data alone, only local structures of genetic networks can be recovered. Instead of inferring such a network, we propose a hypothesis-based approach. We use given knowledge about biological networks to improve sensitivity and interpretability of findings from microarray experiments.Recently introduced methods test if members of predefined gene sets are enriched in a list of top-ranked genes in a microarray study. We improve this approach by defining scores that depend on all members of the gene set and that also take pairwise co-regulation of these genes into account. We calculate the significance of co-regulation of gene sets with a nonparametric permutation test. On two data sets the method is validated and its biological relevance is discussed. It turns out that useful measures for co-regulation of genes in a pathway can be identified adaptively.We refine our method in two aspects specific to pathways. First, to overcome the ambiguity of enzyme-to-gene mappings for a fixed pathway, we introduce algorithms for selecting the best fitting gene for a specific enzyme in a specific condition. In selected cases, functional assignment of genes to pathways is feasible. Second, the sensitivity of detecting relevant pathways is improved by integrating information about pathway topology. The distance of two enzymes is measured by the number of reactions needed to connect them, and enzyme pairs with a smaller distance receive a higher weight in the score calculation.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Calculating the Statistical Significance of Changes in Pathway Activity From Gene Expression Data
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- Letter to the Editor
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Using Alpha Wisely: Improving Power to Detect Multiple QTL
- Relating HIV-1 Sequence Variation to Replication Capacity via Trees and Forests
- Linear Models and Empirical Bayes Methods for Assessing Differential Expression in Microarray Experiments
- Asymptotic Optimality of Likelihood-Based Cross-Validation
- Using Importance Sampling to Improve Simulation in Linkage Analysis
- Model-Based Assignment and Inference of Protein Backbone Nuclear Magnetic Resonances
- Error-Rate and Decision-Theoretic Methods of Multiple Testing: Which Genes Have High Objective Probabilities of Differential Expression?
- Evaluation of Multiple Models to Distinguish Closely Related Forms of Disease Using DNA Microarray Data: an Application to Multiple Myeloma
- Saturation and Quantization Reduction in Microarray Experiments using Two Scans at Different Sensitivities
- Combining Nearest Neighbor Classifiers Versus Cross-Validation Selection
- Multiple Testing. Part I. Single-Step Procedures for Control of General Type I Error Rates
- Multiple Testing. Part II. Step-Down Procedures for Control of the Family-Wise Error Rate
- Augmentation Procedures for Control of the Generalized Family-Wise Error Rate and Tail Probabilities for the Proportion of False Positives
- Calculating the Statistical Significance of Changes in Pathway Activity From Gene Expression Data
- A Family-Based Association Test for Repeatedly Measured Quantitative Traits Adjusting for Unknown Environmental and/or Polygenic Effects
- Deletion/Substitution/Addition Algorithm in Learning with Applications in Genomics
- Classifying Gene Expression Profiles from Pairwise mRNA Comparisons
- Hierarchical Bayesian Neural Network for Gene Expression Temporal Patterns
- A Mixed Model Approach to Identify Yeast Transcriptional Regulatory Motifs via Microarray Experiments
- Mammalian Genomes Ease Location of Human DNA Functional Segments but Not Their Description
- On the Dependence Structure of Sequence Alignment Scores Calculated with Multiple Scoring Matrices
- Increasing Power for Tests of Genetic Association in the Presence of Phenotype and/or Genotype Error by Use of Double-Sampling
- A Method for Evaluating the Impact of Individual Haplotypes on Disease Incidence in Molecular Epidemiology Studies
- Statistical Methods for Identifying Conserved Residues in Multiple Sequence Alignment
- MergeMaid: R Tools for Merging and Cross-Study Validation of Gene Expression Data
- Sparse Inverse of Covariance Matrix of QTL Effects with Incomplete Marker Data
- Maximum Likelihood for Genome Phylogeny on Gene Content
- Confidence Levels for the Comparison of Microarray Experiments
- PLS Dimension Reduction for Classification with Microarray Data
- Statistical Analysis of Genomic Tag Data
- Statistical Analysis of Adsorption Models for Oligonucleotide Microarrays
- Statistical Significance Threshold Criteria For Analysis of Microarray Gene Expression Data
- A Compendium to Ensure Computational Reproducibility in High-Dimensional Classification Tasks
- Validation and Discovery in Markov Models of Genetics Data
- Making Sense of High-Throughput Protein-Protein Interaction Data
- Reader's Reaction
- Reader Reaction
- Response to Foulkes and De Gruttola
- Software Communication
- BayesMendel: an R Environment for Mendelian Risk Prediction
- Letter to the Editor
- Concerns About Unreliable Data from Spotted cDNA Microarrays Due to Cross-Hybridization and Sequence Errors