Biology subjects

Joodaki, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Joodaki, M..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Polyploid cardiomyocytes define disease-specific transcriptional states in the mammalian heart

The adult mammalian heart has a limited regenerative capacity. Following injury, cardiomyocytes undergo a hypertrophic response accompanied by polyploidization, which has been described as a barrier to proliferation and regeneration of the heart1,2. However, the unique molecular programs of polyploidy, or genome multiplied cardiomyocytes, and their influence on the disease-related myocardial remodelling process remains unclear. Here, we integrate single-nuclei and high-resolution spatial multi-omics across human, rat, and mouse hearts to define novel cardiac cell states and their tissue niches in ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease. Computational analysis across scales allowed us to generate detailed networks of the cardiac tissue remodelling process as well as tissue and sub-cellular environments uniquely enriched in polyploid cardiomyocytes or their diploid origins. We identify a conserved, dichotomous transcriptional program distinguishing diploid from polyploid cardiomyocytes. Polyploid cardiomyocytes demonstrated rewired metabolic and chromatin-remodeling transcriptional programs and recapitulate the gene signature of immature human fetal cardiomyocytes. Notably, we observe that polyploid cardiomyocytes--rather than the general myocyte population--are the primary sites of enrichment for major heart-failure drug targets, including the mineralocorticoid, {beta}1-adrenergic, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptors. Based on our cross-species dataset we further identified TNIK, a Wnt-pathway regulator expressed in polyploid cardiomyocytes across species, as a potential therapeutic target and demonstrate that pharmacological TNIK inhibition improves cardiac function after myocardial infarction in rats. Together, this species-spanning, disease-resolved study redefines cardiomyocyte heterogeneity in heart disease and suggests a therapeutic path to heart failure treatment by targeting polyploid cardiomyocytes.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2025

PILOT-GM-VAE: Patient-Level Analysis of single cell Disease Atlas with Optimal Transport of Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders

MotivationThe analysis of single cell disease atlases represents a challenge due to the presence of batch effects, low quality of disease samples, and the multi-scale nature of the data, i.e., samples are described by different cell distributions. Because of these, few computational approaches are performing sample-level disease progression analysis so far. ResultsHere, we introduce Patient-Level Analysis with Optimal Transport based on Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders (PILOT-GM-VAE). PILOT-GM-VAE explores the power of GM-VAE to estimate models describing complex single cell distributions through efficient optimal transport algorithms for estimating the distance between Gaussian Mixtures. Extensive benchmarking on several single cell disease atlases and competing approaches demonstrates the performance of PILOT-GM-VAE in sample-level clustering, sample-level trajectory inference, and batch correction tasks. Moreover, we performed a case study on a breast cancer disease atlas, where PILOT-GM-VAE highlighted cellular and molecular changes associated with breast cancer disease progression. AvailabilityThe software, code, and data for benchmarking are available at https://github.com/CostaLab/PILOT-GM-VAE/tree/main

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2022

Detection of PatIent-Level distances from single cell genomics and pathomics data with Optimal Transport (PILOT)

Although clinical applications represent the next challenge in single-cell genomics and digital pathology, we still lack computational methods to analyze single-cell and pathomics data to find sample level trajectories or clusters associated with diseases. This remains challenging as single-cell/pathomics data are multi-scale, i.e., a sample is represented by clusters of cells/structures and samples cannot be easily compared with each other. Here we propose PatIent Level analysis with Optimal Transport (PILOT). PILOT uses optimal transport to compute the Wasserstein distance between two individual single-cell samples. This allows us to perform unsupervised analysis at the sample level and uncover trajectories or cellular clusters associated with disease progression. We evaluate PILOT and competing approaches in single-cell genomics and pathomics studies involving various human diseases with up to 600 samples/patients and millions of cells or tissue structures. Our results demonstrate that PILOT detects disease-associated samples from large and complex single-cell and pathomics data. Moreover, PILOT provides a statistical approach to delineate non-linear changes in cell populations, gene expression, and tissue structures related to the disease trajectories supporting interpretation of predictions.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

A scalable random walk with restart on heterogeneous networks with Apache Spark for ranking disease-causing genes using type-2 fuzzy data fusion

Prediction and discovery of disease-causing genes are among the main missions of biology and medicine. In recent years, researchers have developed several methods based on gene/protein networks for the detection of causative genes. However, because of the presence of false positives in these networks, the results of these methods often lack accuracy and reliability. This problem can be solved by using multiple genomic sources to reduce noise in data. However, network integration can also affect the quality of the integrated network. In this paper, we present a method named RWRHN (random walk with restart on a heterogeneous network) with fuzzy fusion or RWRHN-FF. In this method, first, four gene-gene similarity networks are constructed based on different genomic sources and then integrated using the type-II fuzzy voter scheme. The resulting gene-gene network is then linked to a disease-disease similarity network, which itself is constructed by the integration of four sources, through a two-part disease-gene network. The product of this process is a reliable heterogeneous network, which is analyzed by the RWRHN algorithm. The results of the analysis with the leave-one-out cross-validation method show that RWRHN-FF outperforms both RWRHN and RWRH. The proposed method is used to predict new genes for prostate, breast, gastric and colon cancers. To reduce the algorithm run time, Apache Spark is used as a platform for parallel execution of the RWRHN algorithm on heterogeneous networks. In the test conducted on heterogeneous networks of different sizes, this solution results in faster convergence than other non-distributed modes of implementations.

bioinformatics↗