Search bioRxiv⌕ Search

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2021.08.08.455551

Prediction of therapy outcomes of CLL using gene expression intensity, clustering, and ANN classification of single cell transcriptomes

Abstract

BackgroundSingle cell transcriptomics is a new technology that enables us to measure the expression levels of genes from an individual cell. The expression information reflects the activity of that individual cell which could be used to indicate the cell types. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a malignancy of B cells, one of the peripheral blood mononuclear cells subtypes. We applied five analytical tools for the study of single cell gene expression in CLL course of therapy. These tools included the analysis of gene expression distributions - median, interquartile ranges, and percentage above quality control (QC) threshold; hierarchical clustering applied to all cells within individual single cell data sets; and artificial neural network (ANN) for classification of healthy peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) subtypes. These tools were applied to the analysis of CLL data representing states before and during the therapy. ResultsWe identified patterns in gene expression that distinguished two patients that had complete remission (complete response), a patient that had a relapse, and a patient that had partial remission within three years of Ibrutinib therapy. Patients with complete remission showed a rapid decline of median gene expression counts, and the total number of gene counts below the QC threshold for healthy cells (670 counts) in 80% of more of the cells. These patients also showed the emergence of healthy-like PBMC cluster maps within 120 days of therapy and distinct changes in predicted proportions of PBMC cell types. ConclusionsThe combination of basic statistical analysis, hierarchical clustering, and supervised machine learning identified patterns from gene expression that distinguish four CLL patients treated with Ibrutinib that experienced complete remission, partial remission, or relapse. These preliminary results suggest that new bioinformatics tools for single cell transcriptomics, including ANN comparison to healthy PBMC, offer promise in prognostics of CLL.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Lyu, M., Jin, H., Bellotti, A. G., Lin, X., Cao, Z., Keskin, D. B., Brusic, V.. 2021-08-09. Prediction of therapy outcomes of CLL using gene expression intensity, clustering, and ANN classification of single cell transcriptomes. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.08.455551

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

StableProt: Structure-Aware Deep Learning for Protein Thermostability (Tm) and Environmental Adaptation (OGT) Prediction

Predicting protein melting temperature (Tm) and organismal optimal growth temperature (OGT) is essential for enzyme engineering, biocatalyst design, and metagenomic bioprospecting, yet computational prediction faces several fundamental bottlenecks: sequence-only representations miss tertiary packing; dual-task coupling induces destructive gradient conflict; natural database skew (>87% mesophiles) drives mesophilic collapse; and existing tools produce uncalibrated point predictions. To address these challenges, we present StableProt, a structure-aware framework that couples amino acid sequences with Foldseek 3Di structural tokens via a frozen SaProt backbone to capture 3D contacts. Disjoint heads condition thermodynamic stability on ecological context without gradient conflict, while targeted 14% mesophilic subsampling expands thermophile representation to eliminate mesophilic collapse. Calibrated ensemble modeling reduces calibration error to 1.92%, providing dependable 95% confidence intervals. Evaluating models across 10{degrees}C temperature intervals reveals severe baseline collapse at thermal extremes, whereas StableProt maintains robust accuracy across regimes. On ProThermDB and zero-shot FireProtDB, StableProt achieves state-of-the-art probabilistic accuracy (CRPS = 4.52{degrees}C and 8.71{degrees}C) while recovering 92.0% of hyperthermophiles ([≥]80{degrees}C), and in prospective validation, its calibrated intervals capture both enzyme stability (75.3% coverage) and host environmental growth temperatures (78.1% coverage). StableProt is freely accessible as an interactive web server at https://stableprot.dixitlab.org/.

bioinformatics↗

RoDPAA: A Robust Dissimilarity-Based Principal Angle Analysis Framework for Multi-View Microbiome Data Integration

Multiview microbiome studies profile the same participants across body sites or molecular layers, but integration is hampered by sparse, compositional data, modest sample sizes and methods that recognize only exact sharing. We present RoDPAA (Robust Dissimilarity-based Principal Angle Analysis), a framework that represents each view through any data-appropriate dissimilarity, such as Bray--Curtis, without log-ratio transformation or likelihood assumptions. RoDPAA aligns view-specific signal subspaces through principal angles, captures complete and partial sharing, and tests by permutation how many components are shared, using only eigendecomposition and little tuning. In Gaussian simulations, RoDPAA matched JIVE and MOFA given true ranks, ran faster and alone recovered the shared dimension in every replicate. In two inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) cohorts with sparse, zero-inflated data, Bray--Curtis-based RoDPAA recovered shared structure that was stable to prevalence filtering, whereas log-ratio-based alternatives were not. Its leading microbiome--metabolome factors, learned without disease labels, were the only ones associated with IBD.

bioinformatics↗

Deducing splicing events from transcript sets with splicelogic

Long-read RNA sequencing captures a greater proportion of full-length transcripts, enabling more accurate isoform identification, discovery of novel isoforms, and more precise differential transcript usage analysis. However, comparing transcripts, whether between conditions or between sets such as novel and annotated isoforms, yields complex isoform changes that are hard to manipulate, summarize, and visualize. This is compounded by vertical integration of some tools, where downstream analysis depends on the specific output of a particular upstream tool. To address this gap, we have developed splicelogic, an R/Bioconductor package that makes transcript-set comparisons biologically interpretable by turning them into discrete splicing events, such as exon skipping, alternative splice sites, intron retention, and alternative transcription start and end sites. We designed splicelogic to integrate easily with existing RNA-seq workflows and tools. The splicelogic functions are modular, readable, and extensible, making it easy for users to adapt core logic to their own custom scientific questions or novel splicing definitions. By obtaining interpretable splicing events from transcript changes, splicelogic enables downstream analyses, including annotation of RNA-binding protein recognition sites, alongside summary statistics and visualization. The splicelogic package is publicly available and distributed through Bioconductor.

bioinformatics↗