@article {726, title = {A comprehensive database for integrated analysis of omics data in autoimmune diseases.}, journal = {BMC Bioinformatics}, volume = {22}, year = {2021}, month = {2021 Jun 24}, pages = {343}, abstract = {

BACKGROUND: Autoimmune diseases are heterogeneous pathologies with difficult diagnosis and few therapeutic options. In the last decade, several omics studies have provided significant insights into the molecular mechanisms of these diseases. Nevertheless, data from different cohorts and pathologies are stored independently in public repositories and a unified resource is imperative to assist researchers in this field.

RESULTS: Here, we present Autoimmune Diseases Explorer ( https://adex.genyo.es ), a database that integrates 82 curated transcriptomics and methylation studies covering 5609 samples for some of the most common autoimmune diseases. The database provides, in an easy-to-use environment, advanced data analysis and statistical methods for exploring omics datasets, including meta-analysis, differential expression or pathway analysis.

CONCLUSIONS: This is the first omics database focused on autoimmune diseases. This resource incorporates homogeneously processed data to facilitate integrative analyses among studies.

}, keywords = {Autoimmune Diseases, Computational Biology, Databases, Factual, Humans}, issn = {1471-2105}, doi = {10.1186/s12859-021-04268-4}, author = {Martorell-Marug{\'a}n, Jordi and L{\'o}pez-Dom{\'\i}nguez, Ra{\'u}l and Garc{\'\i}a-Moreno, Adri{\'a}n and Toro-Dom{\'\i}nguez, Daniel and Villatoro-Garc{\'\i}a, Juan Antonio and Barturen, Guillermo and Mart{\'\i}n-G{\'o}mez, Adoraci{\'o}n and Troule, Kevin and G{\'o}mez-L{\'o}pez, Gonzalo and Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima and Gonz{\'a}lez-Rumayor, V{\'\i}ctor and Pe{\~n}a-Chilet, Maria and Dopazo, Joaquin and Saez-Rodriguez, Julio and Alarc{\'o}n-Riquelme, Marta E and Carmona-S{\'a}ez, Pedro} } @article {389, title = {Precision medicine needs pioneering clinical bioinformaticians.}, journal = {Brief Bioinform}, volume = {20}, year = {2019}, month = {2019 May 21}, pages = {752-766}, abstract = {

Success in precision medicine depends on accessing high-quality genetic and molecular data from large, well-annotated patient cohorts that couple biological samples to comprehensive clinical data, which in conjunction can lead to effective therapies. From such a scenario emerges the need for a new professional profile, an expert bioinformatician with training in clinical areas who can make sense of multi-omics data to improve therapeutic interventions in patients, and the design of optimized basket trials. In this review, we first describe the main policies and international initiatives that focus on precision medicine. Secondly, we review the currently ongoing clinical trials in precision medicine, introducing the concept of {\textquoteright}precision bioinformatics{\textquoteright}, and we describe current pioneering bioinformatics efforts aimed at implementing tools and computational infrastructures for precision medicine in health institutions around the world. Thirdly, we discuss the challenges related to the clinical training of bioinformaticians, and the urgent need for computational specialists capable of assimilating medical terminologies and protocols to address real clinical questions. We also propose some skills required to carry out common tasks in clinical bioinformatics and some tips for emergent groups. Finally, we explore the future perspectives and the challenges faced by precision medicine bioinformatics.

}, keywords = {Cohort Studies, Computational Biology, Humans, Precision Medicine}, issn = {1477-4054}, doi = {10.1093/bib/bbx144}, author = {G{\'o}mez-L{\'o}pez, Gonzalo and Dopazo, Joaquin and Cigudosa, Juan C and Valencia, Alfonso and Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima} } @article {582, title = {Gene set internal coherence in the context of functional profiling.}, journal = {BMC Genomics}, volume = {10}, year = {2009}, month = {2009 Apr 27}, pages = {197}, abstract = {

BACKGROUND: Functional profiling methods have been extensively used in the context of high-throughput experiments and, in particular, in microarray data analysis. Such methods use available biological information to define different types of functional gene modules (e.g. gene ontology -GO-, KEGG pathways, etc.) whose representation in a pre-defined list of genes is further studied. In the most popular type of microarray experimental designs (e.g. up- or down-regulated genes, clusters of co-expressing genes, etc.) or in other genomic experiments (e.g. Chip-on-chip, epigenomics, etc.) these lists are composed by genes with a high degree of co-expression. Therefore, an implicit assumption in the application of functional profiling methods within this context is that the genes corresponding to the modules tested are effectively defining sets of co-expressing genes. Nevertheless not all the functional modules are biologically coherent entities in terms of co-expression, which will eventually hinder its detection with conventional methods of functional enrichment.

RESULTS: Using a large collection of microarray data we have carried out a detailed survey of internal correlation in GO terms and KEGG pathways, providing a coherence index to be used for measuring functional module co-regulation. An unexpected low level of internal correlation was found among the modules studied. Only around 30\% of the modules defined by GO terms and 57\% of the modules defined by KEGG pathways display an internal correlation higher than the expected by chance.This information on the internal correlation of the genes within the functional modules can be used in the context of a logistic regression model in a simple way to improve their detection in gene expression experiments.

CONCLUSION: For the first time, an exhaustive study on the internal co-expression of the most popular functional categories has been carried out. Interestingly, the real level of coexpression within many of them is lower than expected (or even inexistent), which will preclude its detection by means of most conventional functional profiling methods. If the gene-to-function correlation information is used in functional profiling methods, the results obtained improve the ones obtained by conventional enrichment methods.

}, keywords = {Algorithms, Breast Neoplasms, Carcinoma, Intraductal, Noninfiltrating, Computational Biology, Databases, Nucleic Acid, Female, Gene Expression Profiling, Genomics, Humans, Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis, Papillomavirus Infections, Reproducibility of Results}, issn = {1471-2164}, doi = {10.1186/1471-2164-10-197}, author = {Montaner, David and Minguez, Pablo and Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima and Dopazo, Joaquin} } @article {591, title = {Expression and microarrays.}, journal = {Methods Mol Biol}, volume = {453}, year = {2008}, month = {2008}, pages = {245-55}, abstract = {

High throughput methodologies have increased by several orders of magnitude the amount of experimental microarray data available. Nevertheless, translating these data into useful biological knowledge remains a challenge. There is a risk of perceiving these methodologies as mere factories that produce never-ending quantities of data if a proper biological interpretation is not provided. Methods of interpreting these data are continuously evolving. Typically, a simple two-step approach has been used, in which genes of interest are first selected based on thresholds for the experimental values, and then enrichment in biologically relevant terms in the annotations of these genes is analyzed in a second step. For various reasons, such methods are quite poor in terms of performance and new procedures inspired by systems biology that directly address sets of functionally related genes are currently under development.

}, keywords = {Animals, Computational Biology, gene expression, Gene Expression Profiling, Humans, Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis}, issn = {1064-3745}, doi = {10.1007/978-1-60327-429-6_12}, author = {Dopazo, Joaquin and Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima} } @article {603, title = {DBAli tools: mining the protein structure space.}, journal = {Nucleic Acids Res}, volume = {35}, year = {2007}, month = {2007 Jul}, pages = {W393-7}, abstract = {

The DBAli tools use a comprehensive set of structural alignments in the DBAli database to leverage the structural information deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). These tools include (i) the DBAlit program that allows users to input the 3D coordinates of a protein structure for comparison by MAMMOTH against all chains in the PDB; (ii) the AnnoLite and AnnoLyze programs that annotate a target structure based on its stored relationships to other structures; (iii) the ModClus program that clusters structures by sequence and structure similarities; (iv) the ModDom program that identifies domains as recurrent structural fragments and (v) an implementation of the COMPARER method in the SALIGN command in MODELLER that creates a multiple structure alignment for a set of related protein structures. Thus, the DBAli tools, which are freely accessible via the World Wide Web at http://salilab.org/DBAli/, allow users to mine the protein structure space by establishing relationships between protein structures and their functions.

}, keywords = {Algorithms, Amino Acid Sequence, Computational Biology, Data Interpretation, Statistical, Databases, Protein, Internet, Molecular Sequence Data, Protein Conformation, Proteins, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Sequence Alignment, Sequence Analysis, Protein, Sequence Homology, Amino Acid, Software, Structure-Activity Relationship}, issn = {1362-4962}, doi = {10.1093/nar/gkm236}, author = {Marti-Renom, Marc A and Pieper, Ursula and Madhusudhan, M S and Rossi, Andrea and Eswar, Narayanan and Davis, Fred P and Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima and Dopazo, Joaquin and Sali, Andrej} } @article {605, title = {FatiGO +: a functional profiling tool for genomic data. Integration of functional annotation, regulatory motifs and interaction data with microarray experiments.}, journal = {Nucleic Acids Res}, volume = {35}, year = {2007}, month = {2007 Jul}, pages = {W91-6}, abstract = {

The ultimate goal of any genome-scale experiment is to provide a functional interpretation of the data, relating the available information with the hypotheses that originated the experiment. Thus, functional profiling methods have become essential in diverse scenarios such as microarray experiments, proteomics, etc. We present the FatiGO+, a web-based tool for the functional profiling of genome-scale experiments, specially oriented to the interpretation of microarray experiments. In addition to different functional annotations (gene ontology, KEGG pathways, Interpro motifs, Swissprot keywords and text-mining based bioentities related to diseases and chemical compounds) FatiGO+ includes, as a novelty, regulatory and structural information. The regulatory information used includes predictions of targets for distinct regulatory elements (obtained from the Transfac and CisRed databases). Additionally FatiGO+ uses predictions of target motifs of miRNA to infer which of these can be activated or deactivated in the sample of genes studied. Finally, properties of gene products related to their relative location and connections in the interactome have also been used. Also, enrichment of any of these functional terms can be directly analysed on chromosomal coordinates. FatiGO+ can be found at: http://www.fatigoplus.org and within the Babelomics environment http://www.babelomics.org.

}, keywords = {Amino Acid Motifs, Animals, Binding Sites, Computational Biology, Gene Expression Profiling, Genes, Genomics, Humans, Internet, Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis, Programming Languages, Software, Systems Integration, Transcription Factors}, issn = {1362-4962}, doi = {10.1093/nar/gkm260}, author = {Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima and Minguez, Pablo and T{\'a}rraga, Joaqu{\'\i}n and Medina, Ignacio and Alloza, Eva and Montaner, David and Dopazo, Joaquin} } @article {608, title = {ISACGH: a web-based environment for the analysis of Array CGH and gene expression which includes functional profiling.}, journal = {Nucleic Acids Res}, volume = {35}, year = {2007}, month = {2007 Jul}, pages = {W81-5}, abstract = {

We present the ISACGH, a web-based system that allows for the combination of genomic data with gene expression values and provides different options for functional profiling of the regions found. Several visualization options offer a convenient representation of the results. Different efficient methods for accurate estimation of genomic copy number from array-CGH hybridization data have been included in the program. Moreover, the connection to the gene expression analysis package GEPAS allows the use of different facilities for data pre-processing and analysis. A DAS server allows exporting the results to the Ensembl viewer where contextual genomic information can be obtained. The program is freely available at: http://isacgh.bioinfo.cipf.es or within http://www.gepas.org.

}, keywords = {Animals, Cluster Analysis, Computational Biology, Computer Graphics, Gene Expression Profiling, Humans, Internet, Models, Genetic, Nucleic Acid Hybridization, Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis, Programming Languages, Software, Systems Integration, User-Computer Interface}, issn = {1362-4962}, doi = {10.1093/nar/gkm257}, author = {Conde, Lucia and Montaner, David and Burguet-Castell, Jordi and T{\'a}rraga, Joaqu{\'\i}n and Medina, Ignacio and Al-Shahrour, F{\'a}tima and Dopazo, Joaquin} }