An Alignment-Free Regression Approach for Estimating Allele-Specific Expression Using RNA-Seq Data (original) (raw)

The Bgee suite: integrated curated expression atlas and comparative transcriptomics in animals

Nucleic Acids Research, 2020

Bgee is a database to retrieve and compare gene expression patterns in multiple animal species, produced by integrating multiple data types (RNA-Seq, Affymetrix, in situ hybridization, and EST data). It is based exclusively on curated healthy wild-type expression data (e.g., no gene knock-out, no treatment, no disease), to provide a comparable reference of normal gene expression. Curation includes very large datasets such as GTEx (re-annotation of samples as ‘healthy’ or not) as well as many small ones. Data are integrated and made comparable between species thanks to consistent data annotation and processing, and to calls of presence/absence of expression, along with expression scores. As a result, Bgee is capable of detecting the conditions of expression of any single gene, accommodating any data type and species. Bgee provides several tools for analyses, allowing, e.g., automated comparisons of gene expression patterns within and between species, retrieval of the prefered conditi...

GeneiASE: Detection of condition-dependent and static allele-specific expression from RNA-seq data without haplotype information

Scientific reports, 2016

Allele-specific expression (ASE) is the imbalance in transcription between maternal and paternal alleles at a locus and can be probed in single individuals using massively parallel DNA sequencing technology. Assessing ASE within a single sample provides a static picture of the ASE, but the magnitude of ASE for a given transcript may vary between different biological conditions in an individual. Such condition-dependent ASE could indicate a genetic variation with a functional role in the phenotypic difference. We investigated ASE through RNA-sequencing of primary white blood cells from eight human individuals before and after the controlled induction of an inflammatory response, and detected condition-dependent and static ASE at 211 and 13021 variants, respectively. We developed a method, GeneiASE, to detect genes exhibiting static or condition-dependent ASE in single individuals. GeneiASE performed consistently over a range of read depths and ASE effect sizes, and did not require ph...

Assessing allele-specific expression across multiple tissues from RNA-seq read data

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2015

RNA sequencing enables allele-specific expression (ASE) studies that complement standard genotype expression studies for common variants and, importantly, also allow measuring the regulatory impact of rare variants. The Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) is collecting RNA-seq data on multiple tissues of a same set of individuals and novel methods are required for the analysis of these data. We present a statistical method to compare different patterns of ASE across tissues and to classify genetic variants according to their impact on the tissue-wide expression profile. We focus on strong ASE effects that we are expecting to see for protein-truncating variants, but our method can also be adjusted for other types of ASE effects. We illustrate the method with a real data example on a tissue-wide expression profile of a variant causal for lipoid proteinosis, and with a simulation study to assess our method more generally. http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/\~rivas/mamba/ R-sources and data ...

Taming of the wild: a new method for cross study RNA-seq analysis

2020

Background In the last decades, the evolution of RNA-Seq has yielded archived datasets that possess the potential for providing unprecedented inter-study insight into transcriptome evolution, once background noise has been reduced. Here we present a method to quantify intra-condition variation and to remove reference-based transcripts associated with highly variable read counts, prior to differential expression analysis. The method utilizes variation within pairwise distances between normalized read counts for each transcript across all included samples of a given condition. As a case study, we demonstrate our approach at an inter and intra-study level using RNA-seq data from brain samples of dogs, wolves, and two strains of fox (aggressive and tame) prior to performing differential expression analysis to identify common genes associated with tame behaviour. Results By applying our method, the distribution of the gene-wise dispersion estimates improved and the number of outliers det...

A Generalized Linear Model for Decomposing Cis-regulatory, Parent-of-Origin, and Maternal Effects on Allele-Specific Gene Expression

G3 (Bethesda, Md.), 2017

Joint quantification of genetic and epigenetic effects on gene expression is important for understanding the establishment of complex gene regulation systems in living organisms. In particular, genomic imprinting and maternal effects play important roles in the developmental process of mammals and flowering plants. However, the influence of these effects on gene expression are difficult to quantify because they act simultaneously with cis-regulatory mutations. Here we propose a simple method to decompose cis-regulatory (i.e., allelic genotype), genomic imprinting [i.e., parent-of-origin (PO)], and maternal [i.e., maternal genotype (MG)] effects on allele-specific gene expression using RNA-seq data obtained from reciprocal crosses. We evaluated the efficiency of method using a simulated dataset and applied the method to whole-body Drosophila and mouse trophoblast stem cell (TSC) and liver RNA-seq data. Consistent with previous studies, we found little evidence of PO and MG effects in...