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Rätsch, G.

Publications and source records attributed to Rätsch, G..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Efficient graph-color compression with neighborhood-informed Bloom filters

MotivationTechnological advancements in high-throughput DNA sequencing have led to an exponential growth of sequencing data being produced and stored as a byproduct of biomedical research. Despite its public availability, a majority of this data remains hard to query to the research community due to a lack of efficient data representation and indexing solutions. One of the available techniques to represent read data is a condensed form as an assembly graph. Such a representation contains all sequence information but does not store contextual information and metadata.\n\nResultsWe present two new approaches for a compressed representation of a graph coloring: a lossless compression scheme based on a novel application of wavelet tries as well as a highly accurate lossy compression based on a set of Bloom filters. Both strategies retain a coloring with dynamically changing graph topology. We present construction and merge procedures for both methods and evaluate their performance on a wide range of different datasets. By dropping the requirement of a fully lossless compression and using the topological information of the underlying graph, we can reduce memory requirements by up to three orders of magnitude. Representing individual colors as independently stored modules, our approaches are fully dynamic and can be efficiently parallelized. These properties allow for an easy upscaling to the problem sizes common to the biomedical domain.\n\nAvailabilityWe provide prototype implementations in C++, summaries of our experiments as well as links to all datasets publicly at https://github.com/ratschlab/graph_annotation.\n\nContactandre.kahles@inf.ethz.ch, carsten@brown.edu, Gunnar.Ratsch@ratschlab.org

bioinformatics

A pan cancer analysis of promoter activity highlights the regulatory role of alternative transcription start sites and their association with noncoding mutations

Most human protein-coding genes are regulated by multiple, distinct promoters, suggesting that the choice of promoter is as important as its level of transcriptional activity. While the role of promoters as driver elements in cancer has been recognized, the contribution of alternative promoters to regulation of the cancer transcriptome remains largely unexplored. Here we infer active promoters using RNA-Seq data from 1,188 cancer samples with matched whole genome sequencing data. We find that alternative promoters are a major contributor to context-specific regulation of isoform expression and that alternative promoters are frequently deregulated in cancer, affecting known cancer-genes and novel candidates. Our study suggests that a highly dynamic landscape of active promoters shapes the cancer transcriptome, opening many opportunities to further explore the interplay of regulatory mechanism and noncoding somatic mutations with transcriptional aberrations in cancer.

genomics