bioRxiv Science⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2020.06.02.130914

Estimating Microbial Interaction Network:Zero-inated Latent Ising Model Based Approach

Zhou, J.·Viles, W. D.·Lu, B.·Li, Z.·Madan, J. C.·Karagas, M. R.·Gui, J.·Hoen, A. G.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

MotivationThroughout their lifespans, humans continually interact with the microbial world, including those organisms which live in and on the human body. Research in this domain has revealed the extensive links between the human-associated microbiota and health. In particular, the microbiota of the human gut plays essential roles in digestion, nutrient metabolism, immune maturation and homeostasis, neurological signaling, and endocrine regulation. Microbial interaction networks are frequently estimated from data and are an indispensable tool for representing and understanding the relationships among the microbes of a microbiota. In this high-dimensional setting, the zero-inflated and compositional data structure (subject to unit-sum constraint) pose challenges to the accurate estimation of microbial interaction networks. MethodWe propose the zero-inflated latent Ising (ZILI) model for microbial interaction network which assumes that the distribution of relative abundance of microbiota is determined by finite latent states. This assumption is partly supported by the existing findings in literature [20]. The ZILI model can circumvents the unit-sum constraint and alleviates the zero-inflation problem under given assumptions. As for the model selection of ZILI, a two-step algorithm is proposed. ZILI and two-step algorithm are evaluated through simulated data and subsequently applied in our investigation of an infant gut microbiome dataset from New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study. The results are compared with results from traditional Gaussian graphical model (GGM) and dichotomous Ising model (DIS). ResultsThrough the simulation studies, provided that the ZILI model is the true generative model for the data, it is shown that the two-step algorithm can estimate the graphical structure effectively and is robust to a range of alternative settings of the related factors. Both GGM and DIS can not achieve a satisfying performance in these settings. For the infant gut microbiome dataset, we use both ZILI and GGM to estimate microbial interaction network. The final estimated networks turn out to share a statistically significant overlap in which the ZILI and two-step algorithm tend to select the sparser network than those modeled by GGM. From the shared subnetwork, a hub taxon Lachnospiraceae is identified whose involvement in human disease development has been discovered recently in literature. AvailabilityThe data and programs involved in Section 4 and 5 are available on request from the correspondence author. ContactAnne.G.Hoen@dartmouth.edu Supplementary informationSupplementary materials are available at Bioinformatics

Source connections

Explore related subjects

bioinformaticsPreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zhou, J., Viles, W. D., Lu, B., Li, Z., Madan, J. C., Karagas, M. R., Gui, J., Hoen, A. G.. 2020-06-03. Estimating Microbial Interaction Network:Zero-inated Latent Ising Model Based Approach. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.02.130914

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

StableProt: Structure-Aware Deep Learning for Protein Thermostability (Tm) and Environmental Adaptation (OGT) Prediction

Predicting protein melting temperature (Tm) and organismal optimal growth temperature (OGT) is essential for enzyme engineering, biocatalyst design, and metagenomic bioprospecting, yet computational prediction faces several fundamental bottlenecks: sequence-only representations miss tertiary packing; dual-task coupling induces destructive gradient conflict; natural database skew (>87% mesophiles) drives mesophilic collapse; and existing tools produce uncalibrated point predictions. To address these challenges, we present StableProt, a structure-aware framework that couples amino acid sequences with Foldseek 3Di structural tokens via a frozen SaProt backbone to capture 3D contacts. Disjoint heads condition thermodynamic stability on ecological context without gradient conflict, while targeted 14% mesophilic subsampling expands thermophile representation to eliminate mesophilic collapse. Calibrated ensemble modeling reduces calibration error to 1.92%, providing dependable 95% confidence intervals. Evaluating models across 10{degrees}C temperature intervals reveals severe baseline collapse at thermal extremes, whereas StableProt maintains robust accuracy across regimes. On ProThermDB and zero-shot FireProtDB, StableProt achieves state-of-the-art probabilistic accuracy (CRPS = 4.52{degrees}C and 8.71{degrees}C) while recovering 92.0% of hyperthermophiles ([≥]80{degrees}C), and in prospective validation, its calibrated intervals capture both enzyme stability (75.3% coverage) and host environmental growth temperatures (78.1% coverage). StableProt is freely accessible as an interactive web server at https://stableprot.dixitlab.org/.

bioinformatics↗
bioRxiv2026

RoDPAA: A Robust Dissimilarity-Based Principal Angle Analysis Framework for Multi-View Microbiome Data Integration

Multiview microbiome studies profile the same participants across body sites or molecular layers, but integration is hampered by sparse, compositional data, modest sample sizes and methods that recognize only exact sharing. We present RoDPAA (Robust Dissimilarity-based Principal Angle Analysis), a framework that represents each view through any data-appropriate dissimilarity, such as Bray--Curtis, without log-ratio transformation or likelihood assumptions. RoDPAA aligns view-specific signal subspaces through principal angles, captures complete and partial sharing, and tests by permutation how many components are shared, using only eigendecomposition and little tuning. In Gaussian simulations, RoDPAA matched JIVE and MOFA given true ranks, ran faster and alone recovered the shared dimension in every replicate. In two inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) cohorts with sparse, zero-inflated data, Bray--Curtis-based RoDPAA recovered shared structure that was stable to prevalence filtering, whereas log-ratio-based alternatives were not. Its leading microbiome--metabolome factors, learned without disease labels, were the only ones associated with IBD.

bioinformatics↗
bioRxiv2026

Deducing splicing events from transcript sets with splicelogic

Long-read RNA sequencing captures a greater proportion of full-length transcripts, enabling more accurate isoform identification, discovery of novel isoforms, and more precise differential transcript usage analysis. However, comparing transcripts, whether between conditions or between sets such as novel and annotated isoforms, yields complex isoform changes that are hard to manipulate, summarize, and visualize. This is compounded by vertical integration of some tools, where downstream analysis depends on the specific output of a particular upstream tool. To address this gap, we have developed splicelogic, an R/Bioconductor package that makes transcript-set comparisons biologically interpretable by turning them into discrete splicing events, such as exon skipping, alternative splice sites, intron retention, and alternative transcription start and end sites. We designed splicelogic to integrate easily with existing RNA-seq workflows and tools. The splicelogic functions are modular, readable, and extensible, making it easy for users to adapt core logic to their own custom scientific questions or novel splicing definitions. By obtaining interpretable splicing events from transcript changes, splicelogic enables downstream analyses, including annotation of RNA-binding protein recognition sites, alongside summary statistics and visualization. The splicelogic package is publicly available and distributed through Bioconductor.

bioinformatics↗