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Annotation-agnostic differential
expression analysis
Leonardo Collado-Torres
@fellgernon
#ENAR2016
www.slideshare.net/lcolladotor
Mo#va#ng	problem:	iden#fy	and	validate	
regions	of	the	genome	that	change	expression	
when	analyzing	#ssues	with	poten#ally	
incomplete	transcriptome	annota#on
RNA-seq
reads
Genome
(DNA)
RNA transcripts
(many possible
variants)
Measuring gene expression: RNA-seq
Adapted from @jtleek
Genome
(DNA)
Mapped reads
Adapted from @jtleek
Common	analysis	pipelines:	
• Feature	coun#ng	(gene	or	exon	level)	
• Transcript	assembly
Challenges in counting
hBp://www-huber.embl.de/users/anders/HTSeq/doc/count.html
Annotation variation
Frazee et al, Biostatistics, 2014
DER finder approach
•  Find	con#guous	base	pairs	with	
Differen#al	Expression	signal	à	DE	
Regions	or	DERs	
•  Find	nearest	annotated	feature	
Frazee et al, Biostatistics, 2014
coverage
vector
2 6 0 11 6
Genome
(DNA)
Read coverage
Adapted from @jtleek
Jaffe et al, Nat. Neuroscience, 2015
Finding DERs by expressed-regions
CBC:	28	
MD:	24	STR:	28	AMY:	31	HIP:	32	
DFC:	34	
Total N samples: 487
BrainSpan data
Coverage	Data	from	BrainSpan:	
hBp://download.allenins#tute.org/brainspan/MRF_BigWig_Gencode_v10/	
VFC:	30	 MFC:	32	 OFC:	30	 M1C:	25	
S1C:	26	 IPC:	33	 A1C:	30	 STC:	35	 ITC:	33	
V1C:	33
• Data:	3	#ssues	(liver,	tes#s,	heart),	8	samples	each	
• Align	with	
• Iden#fy	expressed	regions	with	derfinder	
– Adjust	coverage	(40	million)	
– Find	expressed	regions	(cutoff	5)	
– Discard	ERs	<	9	bp	
GTEx: DERs via expressed-regions
Presence of intronic ERs
Can	strictly	intronic	ERs	differen#ate	#ssues?
PCs differentiate tissues
Differential intronic ERs | exonic ERs
Differential intronic ERs | exonic ERs
Differential intronic ERs | exonic ERs
Simulation setup
3	replicates: 		
	2	groups,	each	with	5	samples	
	~2	million	paired-end	reads	for	chr17	
	1/6	high,	1/6	low	in	group	2	vs	group	1	
	
Annota#on:	
	complete	
	missing	20%	of	transcripts	(8.28%	exons)	
	
Reference	set:		
	3868	exons	that	overlap	only	1	transcript
Simulation results
•  Similar	power	to	methods	that	have	complete	
annota#on	
•  Methods	with	incorrect	annota#on	lose	a	lot	of	power	
•  Higher	empirical	FDR/FPR
Collado-Torres et al, F1000Research, 2015
regionReport
Mo#va#ng	problem:	iden#fy	and	validate	
regions	of	the	genome	that	change	expression	
when	analyzing	#ssues	with	poten#ally	
incomplete	transcriptome	annota#on	
derfinder	permits	discovery	of	novel	expressed	
regions	
1. we	iden#fied	expressed	intronic	regions	that	
differen#ate	#ssues	independently	of	the	
nearest	exonic	region	
2. we	have	developed	tools	for	reproducible/
shareable	repor#ng
Acknowledgements
Hopkins
Jeffrey Leek
Alyssa Frazee
Abhinav Nellore
Chris Wilks
Ben Langmead
LIBD
Andrew Jaffe
Jooheon Shin
Nikolay Ivanov
Amy Deep
Ran Tao
Yankai Jia
Thomas Hyde
Joel Kleinman
Daniel Weinberger
Harvard
Rafael Irizarry
Michael Love
Funding
NIH
LIBD
CONACyT México
References + software + code
•  Collado-Torres, et al. bioRxiv (2015) doi:10.1101/015370
–  http://bioconductor.org/packages/derfinder
–  http://lcolladotor.github.io/derSupplement/
•  Collado-Torres, et al. F1000Research (2015) doi:10.12688/f1000research.6379.1
-  http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/regionReport
-  http://lcolladotor.github.io/regionReportSupp/
•  Nellore, Collado-Torres, et al. bioRxiv (2015) doi:10.1101/019067
- rail.bio
• Nellore, …, Collado-Torres, et al. bioRxiv (2016) doi:10.1101/038224
- intropolis.rail.bio
•  Jaffe, Shin, Collado-Torres, et al. Nat. Neurosci. (2015) doi:10.1038/nn.3898
–  https://github.com/lcolladotor/libd_n36
–  https://github.com/lcolladotor/enrichedRanges
•  Frazee, et al. Biostatistics. (2014) doi:10.1093/biostatistics/kxt053
–  https://github.com/leekgroup/derfinder