CLIC, a tool for expanding biological pathways based on co-expression across thousands of datasets.
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Abstract | In recent years, there has been a huge rise in the number of publicly available transcriptional profiling datasets. These massive compendia comprise billions of measurements and provide a special opportunity to predict the function of unstudied genes based on co-expression to well-studied pathways. Such analyses can be very challenging, however, since biological pathways are modular and may exhibit co-expression only in specific contexts. To overcome these challenges we introduce CLIC, CLustering by Inferred Co-expression. CLIC accepts as input a pathway consisting of two or more genes. It then uses a Bayesian partition model to simultaneously partition the input gene set into coherent co-expressed modules (CEMs), while assigning the posterior probability for each dataset in support of each CEM. CLIC then expands each CEM by scanning the transcriptome for additional co-expressed genes, quantified by an integrated log-likelihood ratio (LLR) score weighted for each dataset. As a byproduct, CLIC automatically learns the conditions (datasets) within which a CEM is operative. We implemented CLIC using a compendium of 1774 mouse microarray datasets (28628 microarrays) or 1887 human microarray datasets (45158 microarrays). CLIC analysis reveals that of 910 canonical biological pathways, 30% consist of strongly co-expressed gene modules for which new members are predicted. For example, CLIC predicts a functional connection between protein C7orf55 (FMC1) and the mitochondrial ATP synthase complex that we have experimentally validated. CLIC is freely available at . We anticipate that CLIC will be valuable both for revealing new components of biological pathways as well as the conditions in which they are active. |
Year of Publication | 2017
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Journal | PLoS Comput Biol
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Volume | 13
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Issue | 7
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Pages | e1005653
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Date Published | 2017 Jul
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ISSN | 1553-7358
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DOI | 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005653
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PubMed ID | 28719601
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PubMed Central ID | PMC5546725
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Grant list | R35 GM122455 / GM / NIGMS NIH HHS / United States
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