Biology subjects

Ruiz-Perez, D.

Publications and source records attributed to Ruiz-Perez, D..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Unfolding and De-confounding: Biologically meaningful causal inference from longitudinal multi-omic networks using METALICA

A key challenge in the analysis of microbiome data is the integration of multi-omic datasets and the discovery of interactions between microbial taxa, their expressed genes, and the metabolites they consume and/or produce. In an effort to improve the state-of-the-art in inferring biologically meaningful multi-omic interactions, we sought to address some of the most fundamental issues in causal inference from longitudinal multi-omics microbiome data sets. We developed METALICA, a suite of tools and techniques that can infer interactions between microbiome entities. METALICA introduces novel unrolling and de-confounding techniques used to uncover multi-omic entities that are believed to act as confounders for some of the relationships that may be inferred using standard causal inferencing tools. The results lend support to predictions about biological models and processes by which microbial taxa interact with each other in a microbiome. The unrolling process helps to identify putative intermediaries (genes and/or metabolites) to explain the interactions between microbes; the de-confounding process identifies putative common causes that may lead to spurious relationships to be inferred. METALICA was applied to the networks inferred by existing causal discovery and network inference algorithms applied to a multi-omics data set resulting from a longitudinal study of IBD microbiomes. The most significant unrollings and de-confoundings were manually validated using the existing literature and databases. ImportanceWe have developed a suite of tools and techniques capable of inferring interactions between microbiome entities. METALICAintroduces novel techniques called unrolling and de-confounding that are employed to uncover multi-omic entities considered to be confounders for some of the relationships that may be inferred using standard causal inferencing tools. To evaluate our method, we conducted tests on the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) dataset from the iHMP longitudinal study, which we pre-processed in accordance with our previous work.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2021

Microbiome Maps: Hilbert Curve Visualizations of Metagenomic Profiles

MotivationAbundance profiles from metagenomic sequencing data synthesize information from billions of sequenced reads coming from thousands of microbial genomes. Analyzing and understanding these profiles can be a challenge since the data they represent are complex. Particularly challenging is their visualization, as existing techniques are inadequate when the taxa number is in the thousands. We present a technique, and accompanying software, for the visualization of metagenomic abundance profiles using a space-filling curve that transforms a profile into an interactive 2D image. ResultsWe created JO_SCPLOWASPERC_SCPLOW, an easy to use tool for the visualization and exploration of metagenomic profiles from DNA sequencing data. It orders taxa using a space-filling Hilbert curve, and creates a "Microbiome Map", where each position in the image represents the abundance of a single taxon from a reference collection. JO_SCPLOWASPERC_SCPLOW can order taxa in multiple ways, and the resulting microbiome maps can highlight "hot spots" of microbes that are dominant in taxonomic clades or biological conditions. We use JO_SCPLOWASPERC_SCPLOW to visualize samples from a variety of microbiome studies, and discuss ways in which microbiome maps can be an invaluable tool to visualize spatial, temporal, disease, and differential profiles. Our approach can create detailed microbiome maps involving hundreds of thousands of microbial reference genomes with the potential to unravel latent relationships (taxonomic, spatio-temporal, functional, and other) that could remain hidden using traditional visualization techniques. The maps can also be converted into animated movies that bring to life the dynamicity of microbiomes. AvailabilityJO_SCPLOWASPERC_SCPLOW is freely available at microbiomemaps.org and via biorg.cs.fiu.edu/jasper Contactcvaldes2@unl.edu; giri@fiu.edu Supplementary informationSupplementary materials are available at microbiomemaps.org

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Inferring directional relationships in microbial communities using signed Bayesian networks

BackgroundMicrobe-microbe and host-microbe interactions in a microbiome play a vital role in both health and disease. However, the structure of the microbial community and the colonization patterns are highly complex to infer even under controlled wet laboratory conditions. In this study, we investigate what information, if any, can be provided by a Bayesian Network (BN) about a microbial community. Unlike the previously proposed Co-occurrence Networks (CoNs), BNs are based on conditional dependencies and can help in revealing complex associations. ResultsIn this paper, we propose a way of combining a BN and a CoN to construct a signed Bayesian Network (sBN). We report a surprising association between directed edges in signed BNs and known colonization orders. ConclusionsBNs are powerful tools for community analysis and extracting influences and colonization patterns, even though the analysis only uses an abundance matrix with no temporal information. We conclude that directed edges in sBNs when combined with negative correlations are consistent with and strongly suggestive of colonization order.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Dynamic Bayesian networks for integrating multi-omics time-series microbiome data

A key challenge in the analysis of longitudinal microbiome data is the inference of temporal interactions between microbial taxa, their genes, the metabolites they consume and produce, and host genes. To address these challenges we developed a computational pipeline, PALM, that first aligns multi-omics data and then uses dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) to reconstruct a unified model. Our approach overcomes differences in sampling and progression rates, utilizes a biologically-inspired multi-omic framework, reduces the large number of entities and parameters in the DBNs, and validates the learned network. Applying PALM to data collected from inflammatory bowel disease patients, we show that it accurately identifies known and novel interactions. Targeted experimental validations further support a number of the predicted novel metabolite-taxa interactions. Source code and data will be freely available after publication under the MIT Open Source license agreement on our GitHub page. IMPORTANCEWhile a number of large consortia are collecting and profiling several different types of microbiome and genomic time series data, very few methods exist for joint modeling of multi-omics data sets. We developed a new computational pipeline, PALM, which uses Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) and is designed to integrate multi-omics data from longitudinal microbiome studies. When used to integrate sequence, expression, and metabolomics data from microbiome samples along with host expression data, the resulting models identify interactions between taxa, their genes and the metabolites they produce and consume, and their impact on host expression. We tested the models both by using them to predict future changes in microbiome levels, and by comparing the learned interactions to known interactions in the literature. Finally, we performed experimental validations for a few of the predicted interactions to demonstrate the ability of the method to identify novel relationships and their impact.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2018

Dynamic interaction network inference from longitudinal microbiome data

BackgroundSeveral studies have focused on the microbiota living in environmental niches including human body sites. In many of these studies researchers collect longitudinal data with the goal of understanding not just the composition of the microbiome but also the interactions between the different taxa. However, analysis of such data is challenging and very few methods have been developed to reconstruct dynamic models from time series microbiome data.\n\nResultsHere we present a computational pipeline that enables the integration of data across individuals for the reconstruction of such models. Our pipeline starts by aligning the data collected for all individuals. The aligned profiles are then used to learn a dynamic Bayesian network which represents causal relationships between taxa and clinical variables. Testing our methods on three longitudinal microbiome data sets we show that our pipeline improve upon prior methods developed for this task. We also discuss the biological insights provided by the models which include several known and novel interactions.\n\nConclusionsWe propose a computational pipeline for analyzing longitudinal microbiome data. Our results provide evidence that microbiome alignments coupled with dynamic Bayesian networks improve predictive performance over previous methods and enhance our ability to infer biological relationships within the microbiome and between taxa and clinical factors.

microbiology↗