Demographic confounders distort inference of gene regulatory and gene co-expression networks in cancer.
Brief Bioinform
; 24(6)2023 09 22.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-37985453
ABSTRACT
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and gene co-expression networks (GCNs) allow genome-wide exploration of molecular regulation patterns in health and disease. The standard approach for obtaining GRNs and GCNs is to infer them from gene expression data, using computational network inference methods. However, since network inference methods are usually applied on aggregate data, distortion of the networks by demographic confounders might remain undetected, especially because gene expression patterns are known to vary between different demographic groups. In this paper, we present a computational framework to systematically evaluate the influence of demographic confounders on network inference from gene expression data. Our framework compares similarities between networks inferred for different demographic groups with similarity distributions obtained for random splits of the expression data. Moreover, it allows to quantify to which extent demographic groups are represented by networks inferred from the aggregate data in a confounder-agnostic way. We apply our framework to test four widely used GRN and GCN inference methods as to their robustness w. r. t. confounding by age, ethnicity and sex in cancer. Our findings based on more than $ {44000}$ inferred networks indicate that age and sex confounders play an important role in network inference for certain cancer types, emphasizing the importance of incorporating an assessment of the effect of demographic confounders into network inference workflows. Our framework is available as a Python package on GitHub https//github.com/bionetslab/grn-confounders.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Redes Reguladoras de Genes
/
Neoplasias
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Brief Bioinform
Asunto de la revista:
BIOLOGIA
/
INFORMATICA MEDICA
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Alemania