Anna Postovskaya, Koen Vercauteren, Pieter Meysman, Kris Laukens
{"title":"tcrBLOSUM: an amino acid substitution matrix for sensitive alignment of distant epitope-specific TCRs.","authors":"Anna Postovskaya, Koen Vercauteren, Pieter Meysman, Kris Laukens","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae602","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae602","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Deciphering the specificity of T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires is crucial for monitoring adaptive immune responses and developing targeted immunotherapies and vaccines. To elucidate the specificity of previously unseen TCRs, many methods employ the BLOSUM62 matrix to find TCRs with similar amino acid (AA) sequences. However, while BLOSUM62 reflects the AA substitutions within conserved regions of proteins with similar functions, the remarkable diversity of TCRs means that both TCRs with similar and dissimilar sequences can bind the same epitope. Therefore, reliance on BLOSUM62 may bias detection towards epitope-specific TCRs with similar biochemical properties, overlooking those with more diverse AA compositions. In this study, we introduce tcrBLOSUMa and tcrBLOSUMb, specialized AA substitution matrices for CDR3 alpha and CDR3 beta TCR chains, respectively. The matrices reflect AA frequencies and variations occurring within TCRs that bind the same epitope, revealing that both CDR3 alpha and CDR3 beta display tolerance to a wide range of AA substitutions and differ noticeably from the standard BLOSUM62. By accurately aligning distant TCRs employing tcrBLOSUMb, we were able to improve clustering performance and capture a large number of epitope-specific TCRs with diverse AA compositions and physicochemical profiles overlooked by BLOSUM62. Utilizing both the general BLOSUM62 and specialized tcrBLOSUM matrices in existing computational tools will broaden the range of TCRs that can be associated with their cognate epitopes, thereby enhancing TCR repertoire analysis.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142686153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MCGAE: unraveling tumor invasion through integrated multimodal spatial transcriptomics.","authors":"Yiwen Yang, Chengming Zhang, Zhaonan Liu, Kazuyuki Aihara, Chuanchao Zhang, Luonan Chen, Wu Wei","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae608","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae608","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics (SRT) serves as a cornerstone in biomedical research, revealing the heterogeneity of tissue microenvironments. Integrating multimodal data including gene expression, spatial coordinates, and morphological information poses significant challenges for accurate spatial domain identification. Herein, we present the Multi-view Contrastive Graph Autoencoder (MCGAE), a cutting-edge deep computational framework specifically designed for the intricate analysis of spatial transcriptomics (ST) data. MCGAE advances the field by creating multi-view representations from gene expression and spatial adjacency matrices. Utilizing modular modeling, contrastive graph convolutional networks, and attention mechanisms, it generates modality-specific spatial representations and integrates them into a unified embedding. This integration process is further enriched by the inclusion of morphological image features, markedly enhancing the framework's capability to process multimodal data. Applied to both simulated and real SRT datasets, MCGAE demonstrates superior performance in spatial domain detection, data denoising, trajectory inference, and 3D feature extraction, outperforming existing methods. Specifically, in colorectal cancer liver metastases, MCGAE integrates histological and gene expression data to identify tumor invasion regions and characterize cellular molecular regulation. This breakthrough extends ST analysis and offers new tools for cancer and complex disease research.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142686149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
James Strudwick, Laura-Jayne Gardiner, Kate Denning-James, Niina Haiminen, Ashley Evans, Jennifer Kelly, Matthew Madgwick, Filippo Utro, Ed Seabolt, Christopher Gibson, Bharat Bedi, Daniel Clayton, Ciaron Howell, Laxmi Parida, Anna Paola Carrieri
{"title":"AutoXAI4Omics: an automated explainable AI tool for omics and tabular data.","authors":"James Strudwick, Laura-Jayne Gardiner, Kate Denning-James, Niina Haiminen, Ashley Evans, Jennifer Kelly, Matthew Madgwick, Filippo Utro, Ed Seabolt, Christopher Gibson, Bharat Bedi, Daniel Clayton, Ciaron Howell, Laxmi Parida, Anna Paola Carrieri","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae593","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae593","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Machine learning (ML) methods offer opportunities for gaining insights into the intricate workings of complex biological systems, and their applications are increasingly prominent in the analysis of omics data to facilitate tasks, such as the identification of novel biomarkers and predictive modeling of phenotypes. For scientists and domain experts, leveraging user-friendly ML pipelines can be incredibly valuable, enabling them to run sophisticated, robust, and interpretable models without requiring in-depth expertise in coding or algorithmic optimization. By streamlining the process of model development and training, researchers can devote their time and energies to the critical tasks of biological interpretation and validation, thereby maximizing the scientific impact of ML-driven insights. Here, we present an entirely automated open-source explainable AI tool, AutoXAI4Omics, that performs classification and regression tasks from omics and tabular numerical data. AutoXAI4Omics accelerates scientific discovery by automating processes and decisions made by AI experts, e.g. selection of the best feature set, hyper-tuning of different ML algorithms and selection of the best ML model for a specific task and dataset. Prior to ML analysis AutoXAI4Omics incorporates feature filtering options that are tailored to specific omic data types. Moreover, the insights into the predictions that are provided by the tool through explainability analysis highlight associations between omic feature values and the targets under investigation, e.g. predicted phenotypes, facilitating the identification of novel actionable insights. AutoXAI4Omics is available at: https://github.com/IBM/AutoXAI4Omics.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142686143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ToxGIN: an In silico prediction model for peptide toxicity via graph isomorphism networks integrating peptide sequence and structure information.","authors":"Qiule Yu, Zhixing Zhang, Guixia Liu, Weihua Li, Yun Tang","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae583","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae583","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Peptide drugs have demonstrated enormous potential in treating a variety of diseases, yet toxicity prediction remains a significant challenge in drug development. Existing models for prediction of peptide toxicity largely rely on sequence information and often neglect the three-dimensional (3D) structures of peptides. This study introduced a novel model for short peptide toxicity prediction, named ToxGIN. The model utilizes Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN), integrating the underlying amino acid sequence composition and the 3D structures of peptides. ToxGIN comprises three primary modules: (i) Sequence processing module, converting peptide 3D structures and sequences into information of nodes and edges; (ii) Feature extraction module, utilizing GIN to learn discriminative features from nodes and edges; (iii) Classification module, employing a fully connected classifier for toxicity prediction. ToxGIN performed well on the independent test set with F1 score = 0.83, AUROC = 0.91, and Matthews correlation coefficient = 0.68, better than existing models for prediction of peptide toxicity. These results validated the effectiveness of integrating 3D structural information with sequence data using GIN for peptide toxicity prediction. The proposed ToxGIN and data can be freely accessible at https://github.com/cihebiyql/ToxGIN.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11555482/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142614950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"scTCA: a hybrid Transformer-CNN architecture for imputation and denoising of scDNA-seq data.","authors":"Zhenhua Yu, Furui Liu, Yang Li","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae577","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae577","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Single-cell DNA sequencing (scDNA-seq) has been widely used to unmask tumor copy number alterations (CNAs) at single-cell resolution. Despite that arm-level CNAs can be accurately detected from single-cell read counts, it is difficult to precisely identify focal CNAs as the read counts are featured with high dimensionality, high sparsity and low signal-to-noise ratio. This gives rise to a desperate demand for reconstructing high-quality scDNA-seq data. We develop a new method called scTCA for imputation and denoising of single-cell read counts, thus aiding in downstream analysis of both arm-level and focal CNAs. scTCA employs hybrid Transformer-CNN architectures to identify local and non-local correlations between genes for precise recovery of the read counts. Unlike conventional Transformers, the Transformer block in scTCA is a two-stage attention module containing a stepwise self-attention layer and a window Transformer, and can efficiently deal with the high-dimensional read counts data. We showcase the superior performance of scTCA through comparison with the state-of-the-arts on both synthetic and real datasets. The results indicate it is highly effective in imputation and denoising of scDNA-seq data.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11551055/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142614940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"mbDriver: identifying driver microbes in microbial communities based on time-series microbiome data.","authors":"Xiaoxiu Tan, Feng Xue, Chenhong Zhang, Tao Wang","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae580","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae580","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Alterations in human microbial communities are intricately linked to the onset and progression of diseases. Identifying the key microbes driving these community changes is crucial, as they may serve as valuable biomarkers for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. However, there remains a need for further research to develop effective methods for addressing this critical task. This is primarily because defining the driver microbe requires consideration not only of each microbe's individual contributions but also their interactions. This paper introduces a novel framework, called mbDriver, for identifying driver microbes based on microbiome abundance data collected at discrete time points. mbDriver comprises three main components: (i) data preprocessing of time-series abundance data using smoothing splines based on the negative binomial distribution, (ii) parameter estimation for the generalized Lotka-Volterra (gLV) model using regularized least squares, and (iii) quantification of each microbe's contribution to the community's steady state by manipulating the causal graph implied by gLV equations. The performance of nonparametric spline-based denoising and regularized least squares estimation is comprehensively evaluated on simulated datasets, demonstrating superiority over existing methods. Furthermore, the practical applicability and effectiveness of mbDriver are showcased using a dietary fiber intervention dataset and an ulcerative colitis dataset. Notably, driver microbes identified in the dietary fiber intervention dataset exhibit significant effects on the abundances of short-chain fatty acids, while those identified in the ulcerative colitis dataset show a significant correlation with metabolism-related pathways.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11551971/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142614863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deciphering lineage-relevant gene regulatory networks during endoderm formation by InPheRNo-ChIP.","authors":"Chen Su, William A Pastor, Amin Emad","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae592","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae592","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Deciphering the underlying gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that govern early human embryogenesis is critical for understanding developmental mechanisms yet remains challenging due to limited sample availability and the inherent complexity of the biological processes involved. To address this, we developed InPheRNo-ChIP, a computational framework that integrates multimodal data, including RNA-seq, transcription factor (TF)-specific ChIP-seq, and phenotypic labels, to reconstruct phenotype-relevant GRNs associated with endoderm development. The core of this method is a probabilistic graphical model that models the simultaneous effect of TFs on their putative target genes to influence a particular phenotypic outcome. Unlike the majority of existing GRN inference methods that are agnostic to the phenotypic outcomes, InPheRNo-ChIP directly incorporates phenotypic information during GRN inference, enabling the distinction between lineage-specific and general regulatory interactions. We integrated data from three experimental studies and applied InPheRNo-ChIP to infer the GRN governing the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells into definitive endoderm. Benchmarking against a scRNA-seq CRISPRi study demonstrated InPheRNo-ChIP's ability to identify regulatory interactions involving endoderm markers FOXA2, SMAD2, and SOX17, outperforming other methods. This highlights the importance of incorporating the phenotypic context during network inference. Furthermore, an ablation study confirms the synergistic contribution of ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, and phenotypic data, highlighting the value of multimodal integration for accurate phenotype-relevant GRN reconstruction.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11558691/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142614891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"3t-seq: automatic gene expression analysis of single-copy genes, transposable elements, and tRNAs from RNA-seq data.","authors":"Francesco Tabaro, Matthieu Boulard","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbae467","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>RNA sequencing is the gold-standard method to quantify transcriptomic changes between two conditions. The overwhelming majority of data analysis methods available are focused on polyadenylated RNA transcribed from single-copy genes and overlook transcripts from repeated sequences such as transposable elements (TEs). These self-autonomous genetic elements are increasingly studied, and specialized tools designed to handle multimapping sequencing reads are available. Transfer RNAs are transcribed by RNA polymerase III and are essential for protein translation. There is a need for integrated software that is able to analyze multiple types of RNA. Here, we present 3t-seq, a Snakemake pipeline for integrated differential expression analysis of transcripts from single-copy genes, TEs, and tRNA. 3t-seq produces an accessible report and easy-to-use results for downstream analysis starting from raw sequencing data and performing quality control, genome mapping, gene expression quantification, and statistical testing. It implements three methods to quantify TEs expression and one for tRNA genes. It provides an easy-to-configure method to manage software dependencies that lets the user focus on results. 3t-seq is released under MIT license and is available at https://github.com/boulardlab/3t-seq.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11424182/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142341931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CMFHMDA: a prediction framework for human disease-microbe associations based on cross-domain matrix factorization.","authors":"Jing Chen, Ran Tao, Yi Qiu, Qun Yuan","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbae481","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Predicting associations between microbes and diseases opens up new avenues for developing diagnostic, preventive, and therapeutic strategies. Given that laboratory-based biological tests to verify these associations are often time-consuming and expensive, there is a critical need for innovative computational frameworks to predict new microbe-disease associations. In this work, we introduce a novel prediction algorithm called Predicting Human Disease-Microbe Associations using Cross-Domain Matrix Factorization (CMFHMDA). Initially, we calculate the composite similarity of diseases and the Gaussian interaction profile similarity of microbes. We then apply the Weighted K Nearest Known Neighbors (WKNKN) algorithm to refine the microbe-disease association matrix. Our CMFHMDA model is subsequently developed by integrating the network data of both microbes and diseases to predict potential associations. The key innovations of this method include using the WKNKN algorithm to preprocess missing values in the association matrix and incorporating cross-domain information from microbes and diseases into the CMFHMDA model. To validate CMFHMDA, we employed three different cross-validation techniques to evaluate the model's accuracy. The results indicate that the CMFHMDA model achieved Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve scores of 0.9172, 0.8551, and 0.9351$pm $0.0052 in global Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV), local LOOCV, and five-fold CV, respectively. Furthermore, many predicted associations have been confirmed by published experimental studies, establishing CMFHMDA as an effective tool for predicting potential disease-associated microbes.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11427075/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142341938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tongqing Wei, Chenqi Lu, Hanxiao Du, Qianru Yang, Xin Qi, Yankun Liu, Yi Zhang, Chen Chen, Yutong Li, Yuanhao Tang, Wen-Hong Zhang, Xu Tao, Ning Jiang
{"title":"DeepPBI-KG: a deep learning method for the prediction of phage-bacteria interactions based on key genes.","authors":"Tongqing Wei, Chenqi Lu, Hanxiao Du, Qianru Yang, Xin Qi, Yankun Liu, Yi Zhang, Chen Chen, Yutong Li, Yuanhao Tang, Wen-Hong Zhang, Xu Tao, Ning Jiang","doi":"10.1093/bib/bbae484","DOIUrl":"10.1093/bib/bbae484","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Phages, the natural predators of bacteria, were discovered more than 100 years ago. However, increasing antimicrobial resistance rates have revitalized phage research. Methods that are more time-consuming and efficient than wet-laboratory experiments are needed to help screen phages quickly for therapeutic use. Traditional computational methods usually ignore the fact that phage-bacteria interactions are achieved by key genes and proteins. Methods for intraspecific prediction are rare since almost all existing methods consider only interactions at the species and genus levels. Moreover, most strains in existing databases contain only partial genome information because whole-genome information for species is difficult to obtain. Here, we propose a new approach for interaction prediction by constructing new features from key genes and proteins via the application of K-means sampling to select high-quality negative samples for prediction. Finally, we develop DeepPBI-KG, a corresponding prediction tool based on feature selection and a deep neural network. The results show that the average area under the curve for prediction reached 0.93 for each strain, and the overall AUC and area under the precision-recall curve reached 0.89 and 0.92, respectively, on the independent test set; these values are greater than those of other existing prediction tools. The forward and reverse validation results indicate that key genes and key proteins regulate and influence the interaction, which supports the reliability of the model. In addition, intraspecific prediction experiments based on Klebsiella pneumoniae data demonstrate the potential applicability of DeepPBI-KG for intraspecific prediction. In summary, the feature engineering and interaction prediction approaches proposed in this study can effectively improve the robustness and stability of interaction prediction, can achieve high generalizability, and may provide new directions and insights for rapid phage screening for therapy.</p>","PeriodicalId":9209,"journal":{"name":"Briefings in bioinformatics","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11440089/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142341940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}