European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Structural and Computational Biology Unit, Heidelberg, Germany.
Faculty of Biosciences, Collaboration for Joint PhD Degree between EMBL and Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
Mol Syst Biol. 2023 Jun 12;19(6):e11627. doi: 10.15252/msb.202311627. Epub 2023 Apr 19.
Enhancers play a vital role in gene regulation and are critical in mediating the impact of noncoding genetic variants associated with complex traits. Enhancer activity is a cell-type-specific process regulated by transcription factors (TFs), epigenetic mechanisms and genetic variants. Despite the strong mechanistic link between TFs and enhancers, we currently lack a framework for jointly analysing them in cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks (GRN). Equally important, we lack an unbiased way of assessing the biological significance of inferred GRNs since no complete ground truth exists. To address these gaps, we present GRaNIE (Gene Regulatory Network Inference including Enhancers) and GRaNPA (Gene Regulatory Network Performance Analysis). GRaNIE (https://git.embl.de/grp-zaugg/GRaNIE) builds enhancer-mediated GRNs based on covariation of chromatin accessibility and RNA-seq across samples (e.g. individuals), while GRaNPA (https://git.embl.de/grp-zaugg/GRaNPA) assesses the performance of GRNs for predicting cell-type-specific differential expression. We demonstrate their power by investigating gene regulatory mechanisms underlying the response of macrophages to infection, cancer and common genetic traits including autoimmune diseases. Finally, our methods identify the TF PURA as a putative regulator of pro-inflammatory macrophage polarisation.
增强子在基因调控中起着至关重要的作用,对于介导与复杂性状相关的非编码遗传变异的影响至关重要。增强子活性是一个受转录因子(TFs)、表观遗传机制和遗传变异调控的细胞类型特异性过程。尽管 TFs 和增强子之间存在很强的机制联系,但我们目前缺乏在细胞类型特异性基因调控网络(GRN)中联合分析它们的框架。同样重要的是,由于不存在完整的真实情况,我们缺乏评估推断的 GRN 生物学意义的无偏方法。为了解决这些差距,我们提出了 GRaNIE(包括增强子的基因调控网络推断)和 GRaNPA(基因调控网络性能分析)。GRaNIE(https://git.embl.de/grp-zaugg/GRaNIE)基于染色质可及性和 RNA-seq 在样本(例如个体)中的共变构建增强子介导的 GRN,而 GRaNPA(https://git.embl.de/grp-zaugg/GRaNPA)评估 GRN 预测细胞类型特异性差异表达的性能。我们通过研究巨噬细胞对感染、癌症和常见遗传特征(包括自身免疫性疾病)的反应的基因调控机制来证明它们的强大功能。最后,我们的方法确定 TF PURA 是促炎巨噬细胞极化的潜在调节因子。
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