Abstract
Gene expression is regulated by a large variety of mechanisms. Previous studies attempting to model the quantitative relationships between gene expression levels and regulatory mechanisms have considered only one or a few mechanisms at a time, which cannot provide a full picture of the complex interactions among different mechanisms. This was partially due to the heterogeneity of the mechanisms, which involve different types of biological objects and data representations, making it hard to study them in a unified way. Here, we describe a flexible framework that can integrate very different types of data for studying their joint effects on gene expression. In this framework, domain knowledge is represented by metapaths, while the manifestations of their effects in actual data are summarized by an embedding of the biological objects in a latent space. We demonstrate the use of our framework in integrating several diverse types of data that are related to gene expression in different ways, including DNA contacts in three-dimensional genome architecture, protein–protein interactions, genomic neighbourhoods and broad chromatin accessibility domains. The modelling results reveal that these several types of data are able to model gene expression fairly well individually, but even better when integrated.
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Data availability
Example data for testing the source code are available at https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.1518993.v143. The public data used for producing the results in this study and the embeddings produced from the five cell lines can be downloaded from http://yiplab.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/geek/.
Code availability
Source codes are available at https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.1518993.v143.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Funds 14170217 (C.C., D.L. and K.Y.Y.), 14203119 (A.S.L.C. and K.Y.Y.), 14200817, 15200715 and 15204116 (E.L.), Collaborative Research Funds 4045-18WF (A.S.L.C. and K.Y.Y.), 4054-16G (T.-L.L. and K.Y.Y.) and C4057-18EF (K.Y.Y.), Area of Excellence AoE/P-404/18 (E.L.), Theme-based Research Scheme T12C-714/14-R (K.Y.Y.), the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission Innovative and Technology Fund ITS/310/18 (E.L.) and the Hong Kong Epigenomics Project (EpiHK). K.Y.Y. was also supported by CUHK Young Researcher Award, Outstanding Fellowship and Seed Funding for Strategic Areas.
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K.Y.Y. conceived the study. Q.C. and Z.Z. designed and implemented GEEK. Q.C., Z.Z., A.X.F., Q.W. and K.Y.Y. performed data analyses. Q.C., A.X.F., T.-L.L., E.L., A.S.L.C., C.C., D.L. and K.Y.Y. interpreted the results. K.Y.Y. and Q.C. wrote the manuscript.
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Supplementary text (including algorithms 1 and 2), Table 1 and Figs. 1–23.
Supplementary Table 2
Functional enrichment analysis of gene clusters based on their embeddings. Each row represents the genes in a cluster that are annotated with the same functional term. The different columns specify the embedding setting, enrichment results and gene symbols, with their full descriptions provided in the file.
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Cao, Q., Zhang, Z., Fu, A.X. et al. A unified framework for integrative study of heterogeneous gene regulatory mechanisms. Nat Mach Intell 2, 447–456 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0205-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0205-2
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