ABAEnrichment (version 1.2.2)

aba_enrich: Test genes for expression enrichment in human brain regions

Description

Tests for enrichment of user defined candidate genes in the set of expressed protein coding genes in different human brain regions. It integrates the expression of the candidate gene set (averaged across donors) and the structural information of the brain using an ontology, both provided by the Allen Brain Atlas project [1-4]. The statistical analysis is performed by interfacing the ontology enrichment software FUNC [5].

Usage

aba_enrich(genes, dataset = 'adult', test = 'hyper',  cutoff_quantiles = seq(0.1, 0.9, 0.1), n_randsets = 1000)

Arguments

genes

if test = 'hyper' (default) a binary vector with 1 for candidate genes and 0 for background genes. If no background genes are defined, all remaining protein coding genes are used as background. If test = 'wilcoxon' a numeric vector of scores. The names of the vector are the gene identifiers: either Entrez-ID, Ensembl-ID or HGNC-symbol.

dataset

'adult' for the microarray dataset of adult human brains; '5_stages' for RNA-seq expression data for different stages of the developing human brain, grouped into 5 developmental stages; 'dev_effect' for a developmental effect score. For details see vignette("ABAData",package="ABAData").

test

'hyper' (default) for the hypergeometric test or 'wilcoxon' for the Wilcoxon rank test.

cutoff_quantiles

the FUNC enrichment analyses will be performed for the sets of expressed genes at given expression quantiles defined in this vector [0,1].

n_randsets

integer defining the number of random sets created to compute the FWER.

Value

A list with components

results

a dataframe with the FWERs from the enrichment analyses per brain region and age category, ordered by 'age_category', 'times_FWER_under_0.05', 'mean_FWER' and 'min_FWER'; with 'min_FWER' for example denoting the minimum FWER for expression enrichment of the candidate genes in this brain region across all expression cutoffs. 'FWERs' is a semicolon separated string with the single FWERs for all cutoffs. 'equivalent_structures' is a semicolon separated string that lists structures with identical expression data due to lack of independent expression measurements in all regions.

genes

a vector of the requested genes, excluding those genes for which no expression data is available and which therefore were not included in the enrichment analysis.

cutoffs

a dataframe with the expression values that correspond to the requested cutoff quantiles.

Details

The function aba_enrich performs enrichment analyses of candidate genes within expressed protein coding genes in human brain regions. The brain regions are categorized using an ontology. Enrichment of candidate genes is tested using the hypergeometric or the Wilcoxon rank test of the ontology enrichment software FUNC [5]. The hypergeometric test evaluates the enrichment of expressed candidate genes compared to a set of expressed background genes for each brain region. The background genes can be defined explicitly like the candidate genes or, as default, consist of all protein coding genes from the dataset, which are not candidate genes. The Wilcoxon rank test does not compare candidate and background genes, but the user defined scores associated with the candidate genes, i.e. it compares the ranks of the scores of expressed genes in a given brain region to the ranks of all candidate genes that are expressed somewhere in the brain. In addition to gene expression the enrichment may refer to a developmental effect score, which describes how much a gene's expression changes over time. Three different datasets can be used with aba_enrich: first, the developmental effect score, second, microarray data from adult donors and third, RNA-seq data from donors of five different developmental stages (prenatal, infant, child, adolescent, adult). In the latter case the analyses are performed independently for each developmental stage. The expression definition for genes is variable. Different quantiles of expression over all genes are used (e.g. the lowest 40% of gene expression are 'not expressed' and the upper 60% are 'expressed' for a quantile of 0.4). These cutoffs are set with the parameter cutoff_quantiles and an analysis is run for every cutoff separately.

References

[1] Hawrylycz, M.J. et al. (2012) An anatomically comprehensive atlas of the adult human brain transcriptome, Nature 489: 391-399. doi:10.1038/nature11405 [2] Miller, J.A. et al. (2014) Transcriptional landscape of the prenatal human brain, Nature 508: 199-206. doi:10.1038/nature13185 [3] Allen Institute for Brain Science. Allen Human Brain Atlas [Internet]. Available from: http://human.brain-map.org/ [4] Allen Institute for Brain Science. BrainSpan Atlas of the Developing Human Brain [Internet]. Available from: http://brainspan.org/ [5] Pruefer, K. et al. (2007) FUNC: A package for detecting significant associations between gene sets and ontological, BMC Bioinformatics 8: 41. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-41

See Also

vignette("ABAEnrichment",package="ABAEnrichment") vignette("ABAData",package="ABAData") get_expression plot_expression get_name get_sampled_substructures get_superstructures

Examples

#### Perform gene expression enrichment analysis on 13 candidate genes in five developmental 
#### stages of the human brain using the hypergeometric test implemented in FUNC[5]   
## create input vector with candidate genes (HGNC-symbols)
genes=rep(1,13)
names(genes)=c('NCAPG', 'APOL4', 'NGFR', 'NXPH4', 'C21orf59', 'CACNG2', 'AGTR1', 'ANO1',
  'BTBD3', 'MTUS1', 'CALB1', 'GYG1', 'PAX2')
## run enrichment analysis
res=aba_enrich(genes,dataset='5_stages',cutoff_quantiles=c(0.5,0.7,0.9), n_randsets=100)
## get FWERs for enrichment of candidate genes among expressed genes
fwers=res[[1]]
## see results for the brain regions with highest enrichment for children (age_category 3)
head(fwers[fwers[,1]==3,])
## see the input genes vector (only genes with expression data available) 
res[2]
## see the expression values that correspond to the requested cutoff quantiles
res[3]


#### Perform gene expression enrichment analysis on 15 candidate genes in the  
#### adult human brain using the wilcoxon rank test implemented in FUNC[5] 
## create input vector with random scores associated with the candidate genes (Entrez-Ids)
genes=sample(1:50,15)
names(genes)=c(324,8312,673,1029,64764,1499,3021,3417,3418,8085,3845,9968,5290,5727,5728)
## run enrichment analysis
res=aba_enrich(genes,dataset='adult',test='wilcoxon',cutoff_quantiles=c(0.2,0.5,0.8),
  n_randsets=100)
## see results for the brain regions with highest enrichment 
head(res[[1]])
## see the input genes vector and the expression values that correspond 
## to the requested cutoff quantiles
res[2:3]