Barsi, S. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2024

RIDDEN: Data-driven inference of receptor activity from transcriptomic data

Intracellular signaling initiated from ligand bound receptors plays a fundamental role in both physiological regulation and development of disease states, making receptors one of the most frequent drug targets. Systems level analysis of receptor activity can help to identify cell and disease type specific receptor activity alterations. While recently several computational methods have been developed to analyse ligand -receptor interactions based on transcriptomics data, none of them focuses directly on the receptor side of these interactions. Also, most of the methods use directly the expression of ligands and receptors to infer active interaction, while co-expression of genes does not necessarily indicate functional interactions or activated state. To address these problems, we developed RIDDEN (Receptor actIvity Data Driven inferENce), a computational tool, which predicts receptor activities from the receptor-regulated gene expression profiles, and not from the expressions of ligand and receptor genes. We collected 14463 perturbation gene expression profiles for 229 different receptors. Using these data, we trained the RIDDEN model, which can effectively predict receptor activity for new bulk and single-cell transcriptomics datasets. We validated RIDDENs performance on independent in vitro and in vivo receptor perturbation data, showing that RIDDENs model weights correspond to known regulatory interactions between receptors and transcription factors, and that predicted receptor activities correlate with receptor and ligand expressions in in vivo datasets. We also show that RIDDEN can be used to identify mechanistic biomarkers in an immune checkpoint blockade-treated cancer patient cohort. RIDDEN, the largest transcriptomics-based receptor activity inference model, can be used to identify cell populations with altered receptor activity and, in turn, foster the study of cell-cell communication using transcriptomics data. Graphical Abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=157 SRC="FIGDIR/small/626558v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (31K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@155d87dorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@f80ed2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@195140eorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@57ccfa_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2021

Computational drug repurposing against SARS-CoV-2 reveals plasma membrane cholesterol depletion as key factor of antiviral drug activity

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 infection-induced gene expression signatures to drug treatment-induced gene expression signatures is a promising bioinformatic tool to repurpose existing drugs against SARS-CoV-2. The general hypothesis of signature based drug repurposing is that drugs with inverse similarity to a disease signature can reverse disease phenotype and thus be effective against it. However, in the case of viral infection diseases, like SARS-CoV-2, infected cells also activate adaptive, antiviral pathways, so that the relationship between effective drug and disease signature can be more ambiguous. To address this question, we analysed gene expression data from in vitro SARS-CoV-2 infected cell lines, and gene expression signatures of drugs showing anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity. Our extensive functional genomic analysis showed that both infection and treatment with in vitro effective drugs leads to activation of antiviral pathways like NFkB and JAK-STAT. Based on the similarity - and not inverse similarity - between drug and infection-induced gene expression signatures, we were able to predict the in vitro antiviral activity of drugs. We also identified SREBF1/2, key regulators of lipid metabolising enzymes, as the most activated transcription factors by several in vitro effective antiviral drugs. Using a fluorescently labeled cholesterol sensor, we showed that these drugs decrease the cholesterol levels of plasma-membrane. Supplementing drug-treated cells with cholesterol reversed the in vitro antiviral effect, suggesting the depleting plasma-membrane cholesterol plays a key role in virus inhibitory mechanism. Our results can help to more effectively repurpose approved drugs against SARS-CoV-2, and also highlights key mechanisms behind their antiviral effect. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=171 HEIGHT=200 SRC="FIGDIR/small/459786v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (37K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@7cd823org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@51f699org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@114c555org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@a774ee_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

systems biology↗