Inference of phenotype-relevant transcriptional regulatory networks elucidates cancer type-specific regulatory mechanisms in a pan-cancer study

NPJ Syst Biol Appl. 2021 Feb 8;7(1):9. doi: 10.1038/s41540-021-00169-7.

Abstract

Reconstruction of transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs) is a powerful approach to unravel the gene expression programs involved in healthy and disease states of a cell. However, these networks are usually reconstructed independent of the phenotypic (or clinical) properties of the samples. Therefore, they may confound regulatory mechanisms that are specifically related to a phenotypic property with more general mechanisms underlying the full complement of the analyzed samples. In this study, we develop a method called InPheRNo to identify "phenotype-relevant" TRNs. This method is based on a probabilistic graphical model that models the simultaneous effects of multiple transcription factors (TFs) on their target genes and the statistical relationship between the target genes' expression and the phenotype. Extensive comparison of InPheRNo with related approaches using primary tumor samples of 18 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas reveals that InPheRNo can accurately reconstruct cancer type-relevant TRNs and identify cancer driver TFs. In addition, survival analysis reveals that the activity level of TFs with many target genes could distinguish patients with poor prognosis from those with better prognosis.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Gene Expression / genetics
  • Gene Expression Regulation / genetics
  • Gene Regulatory Networks / genetics*
  • Humans
  • Models, Statistical
  • Neoplasms / genetics
  • Phenotype
  • Regulatory Elements, Transcriptional / genetics*
  • Software
  • Systems Biology / methods
  • Transcription Factors / genetics

Substances

  • Transcription Factors