Vincent, M. J. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2017

Hierarchical Analysis of Multi-mapping RNA-Seq Reads Improves the Accuracy of Allele-specific Expression

Allele-specific expression (ASE) refers to the differential abundance of the allelic copies of a transcript. Direct RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) can provide quantitative estimates of ASE for genes with transcribed polymorphisms. However, estimating ASE is challenging due to ambiguities in read alignment. Current approaches do not account for the hierarchy of multiple read alignments to genes, isoforms, and alleles. We have developed EMASE (Expectation-Maximization for Allele Specific Expression), an integrated approach to estimate total gene expression, ASE, and isoform usage based on hierarchical allocation of multi-mapping reads. In simulations, EMASE outperforms standard ASE estimation methods. We apply EMASE to RNA-Seq data from F1 hybrid mice where we observe widespread ASE associated with cis-acting polymorphisms and a small number of parent-of-origin effects at known imprinted genes. The EMASE software is freely available under GNU license at https://github.com/churchill-lab/emase and it can be adapted to other sequencing applications.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2017

The Effects of Sex and Diet on Physiology and Liver Gene Expression in Diversity Outbred Mice

Inter-individual variation in metabolic health and adiposity is driven by many factors. Diet composition and genetic background and the interactions between these two factors affect adiposity and related traits such as circulating cholesterol levels. In this study, we fed 850 Diversity Outbred mice, half females and half males, with either a standard chow diet or a high fat, high sucrose diet beginning at weaning and aged them to 26 weeks. We measured clinical chemistry and body composition at early and late time points during the study, and liver transcription at euthanasia. Males weighed more than females and mice on a high fat diet generally weighed more than those on chow. Many traits showed sex- or diet-specific changes as well as more complex sex by diet interactions. We mapped both the physiological and molecular traits and found that the genetic architecture of the physiological traits is complex, with many single locus associations potentially being driven by more than one polymorphism. For liver transcription, we find that local polymorphisms affect constitutive and sex-specific transcription, but that the response to diet is not affected by local polymorphisms. We identified two loci for circulating cholesterol levels. We performed mediation analysis by mapping the physiological traits, given liver transcript abundance and propose several genes that may be modifiers of the physiological traits. By including both physiological and molecular traits in our analyses, we have created deeper phenotypic profiles to identify additional significant contributors to complex metabolic outcomes such as polygenic obesity. We make the phenotype, liver transcript and genotype data publicly available as a resource for the research community.

genetics↗