how to analyze a gene expression time course

by Mr. Cedrick Casper DVM 5 min read

Such studies compare gene expression across time by measuring mRNA levels from samples collected at different timepoints 1. Such time-course studies can vary from measuring a few distinct timepoints, to sampling ten to 20 time points. These longer time series are particularly interesting for investigating development over time.

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How are differentially expressed genes determined for time course data?

Identifying groups of genes with similar expression time-courses is a crucial first step in the analysis. As biologically relevant groups frequently overlap, due to genes having several distinct roles in those cellular processes, this is a difficult problem for classical clustering methods. We use a mixture model to circumvent this principal problem, with hidden Markov models (HMMs) …

What is the next step in a gene expression analysis?

Time course gene expression experiments provide opportunities to explore patterns of gene expression change over a time and understand the dynamic behavior of gene expression, which is crucial for study on development and progression of biology and disease. Analysis of the gene expression time-course profiles has not been fully exploited so far.

Is gene expression over time a curve?

I am doing time course study for gene expression in cell culture. I am doing 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24 hours. ... Gene Expression Analysis. Gene Expression Profiling. …

What is global analysis of gene expression?

Aug 01, 2005 · Abstract and Figures. Measuring gene expression over time can provide important insights into basic cellular processes. Identifying groups …

What is time course analysis?

In time course expression analysis, gene expression is measured at multiple time points during a natural biological process such as spontaneous differentiation of progenitor cells, or during an induced biological process such as cellular response to a stimulus or treatment (Storey et al. 2005).Mar 18, 2020

How do you analyze gene expression?

Even though nearly every cell in an organism's body contains the same set of genes, only a fraction of these genes are used in any given cell at any given time.

What are the steps in process of gene expression?

It consists of two major steps: transcription and translation. Together, transcription and translation are known as gene expression. During the process of transcription, the information stored in a gene's DNA is passed to a similar molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid) in the cell nucleus.Mar 26, 2021

What is the timing of gene expression?

Some cells will induce the early genes few minutes after the stimulus, while in the same cell, other genes can be expressed up to 40 min after the first wave of gene expression.Apr 25, 2018

What is expression analysis?

Gene expression analysis involves the determination of the pattern of genes expressed at the level of genetic transcription, under specific circumstances or in a specific cell.Jan 21, 2021

Why do we measure gene expression?

Why measure gene expression? Linking the expression of specific genes to a biological process or phenotype helps scientists understand gene function, biological pathways, and the genes that regulate development, cell behavior, cell signaling, and disease.

What do you understand by gene expression?

Listen to pronunciation. (jeen ek-SPREH-shun) The process by which a gene gets turned on in a cell to make RNA and proteins. Gene expression may be measured by looking at the RNA, or the protein made from the RNA, or what the protein does in a cell.

What three main molecules are involved in gene expression?

Messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules carry the coding sequences for protein synthesis and are called transcripts; ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules form the core of a cell's ribosomes (the structures in which protein synthesis takes place); and transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules carry amino acids to the ribosomes during protein ...

How do cells know which genes to express?

How do these cues help a cell "decide" what genes to express? Cells don't make decisions in the sense that you or I would. Instead, they have molecular pathways that convert information – such as the binding of a chemical signal to its receptor – into a change in gene expression.

What controls the timing of gene expression?

Transcription factors (TFs) play an essential role in controlling how a cell will respond to a stimulus through the regulation of gene expression [1–3]. The gene regulatory code, inscribed in the DNA of each gene, specifies how the production of each gene product will be controlled in space, time and magnitude.Jan 18, 2022

Why is the controlled timing of gene expression crucial to an organism?

The regulation of gene expression conserves energy and space. It would require a significant amount of energy for an organism to express every gene at all times, so it is more energy efficient to turn on the genes only when they are required.

At what point in gene expression do you think the process could be regulated?

Gene regulation can occur at any point of the transcription-translation process but most often occurs at the transcription level. Proteins that can be activated by other cells and signals from the environment are called transcription factors.

Most recent answer

I think you should normalize each value first by the control gene at each given time point, calculating the SD as you would with the raw data. Then you should express it in relation to the time 0, which should not change the SD, just do the same calculation with the data. It is advisable to do three biological replicates per time point/treatment.

Popular Answers (1)

I would take each time point individually (1,2,4,8hrs etc) lysing the cells and freezing. The day after your experiment extract all RNA at the same time and normalise to a housekeeper gene (or two if you can - normalise to the geometric mean) such as BActin, Gapdh, Bmn etc.

All Answers (6)

where dCt are the delta-Ct values from qPCR, TIME is the variable coding the time points (if you have a good and relatively simple functional model, like for instance a linear or logistic change, then you can use TIME as a metric variable with appropriate transformations; otherwise I would suggest to code TIME as a categorical variable), and TREATMENT is the categorical variable specifying the treatmen ("control" or "treated").

How do gene expression studies compare time?

While many expression studies are designed to compare the gene expression between distinct groups, there is also a long history of time-course expression studies. Such studies compare gene expression across time by measuring mRNA levels from samples collected at different timepoints 1. Such time-course studies can vary from measuring a few distinct timepoints, to sampling ten to 20 time points. These longer time series are particularly interesting for investigating development over time. More recently, a new variety of time course studies have come from single-cell sequencing experiments ( Habib et al ., 2016; Shalek et al ., 2014; Trapnell et al ., 2014) which can sequence single cells at different stages of development; in this case, the time point is the stage of the cell in the process of development -- a value that is not know but estimated from the data as its "pseudo-time."

What is the next step in gene expression analysis?

The next step in a gene expression analysis is typically to run a differential expression analysis, generally to find genes different between different conditions. For time-course data, there are two different approaches for determining differentially expressed genes,

What is the purpose of clustering genes?

Before clustering the genes, we first reduce the set of genes of interest to genes that (1) are found to be significantly differentially expressed; (2) have a large-fold change between conditions. Reducing the set of genes on which to perform the clustering allows the estimation of the centroids of the clusters with more stability.

Where to find moanin and timecoursedata?

moanin and timecoursedata are available from bioconductor, and can be installed using the install function in the package BiocManager, along with the corresponding package that contains time course datasets we will use:

What are the two steps of quality control and exploratory analysis?

Typically, two quality control and exploratory analysis steps are performed before and after normalization: (1) low dimensionality embedding of the samples; (2) correlation plots between each sample. In both cases, we expect a strong biological signal, while replicate samples should be strongly clustered or correlated with one another.

How are samples colored?

Samples are colored by condition (top row) and sampling time (bottom row).

Why are fitted spline functions plotted?

Further, a fitted spline function for each group is plotted to aid in comparing global trends across conditions.

What is the estimated gene expression of a cluster?

The estimated gene expression y^ijin a particular cluster can be expressed as a linear combination of the observed gene expression, i.e. y^ij=∑l=1n∑m=1Taijlmylm. The matrix obtained by arranging aijlmin proper entries is called the smoothing matrix.

What is the mixed effect model of gene expression?

Mixed-effect model representation of gene expression over time. The deviation of gene y1's expression from the mean curve μ(t) in cluster k, is a combination of the so-called random effect band the measurement error ɛ. Ψ1represents the ‘real’ expression curve of gene 1. Note that the bis constant over all time-points and captures between time-point dependence.

What is SSC in genetics?

Here, we introduce a data-driven clustering method, called smoothing spline clustering (SSC), that overcomes the aforementioned obstacles using a mixed-effect smoothing spline model and the rejection-controlled EM algorithm (11). The SSC method not only provides gene-to-cluster assignment but a predicted mean curve for each cluster and associated confidence bands and R2value for each cluster. A distinguishing feature of SSC is that it accurately estimates individual gene expression profiles and the mean gene expression profile within clusters simultaneously, making it extremely powerful for clustering time course data.

What is the maximization step of EM?

The maximization step of the EM algorithm involves computing and maximizing the weighted version of the penalized log-likelihood (Equation 7) for each cluster:

When is RCEM run with multiple chains?

Finally, in order to avoid local optima , the RCEM is run with multiple chains.

Which equation is used to incorporate cluster assignment proportions?

To incorporate the cluster assignment proportions described in Equation 5, we combine 5 and 6 to yield the complete data penalized log-likelihood:

Is maximizing the penalized log likelihood possible?

Since directly maximizing the penalized log-likelihood (Equation 7) is not analytically possible, we develop a variation of the EM algorithm (11) in conjunction with generalized cross-validation (GCV) (17,18) for the task. In our case, the expectation step of the EM algorithm is the computation of the probability that a particular gene belongs to each cluster given all the parameters in the model, which is simply,

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