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Autoencoder-Transformed Transcriptome Improves Genotype-Phenotype Association Studies

delete2025-07-01
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OA
AI
Q
Qing Li
J
Jiayi Bian
J
Janith Weeraman
Z
Zilong Zhang
A
Albert Leung
Q
Qi-Xuan Ding
T
Thierry Chekouo
L
Lang Wu
J
Jun Yan
J
Jingjing Wu
Q
Quan Long
DOI:10.1109/TCBBIO.2025.3568376delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) is an emerging model leveraging gene expressions to direct genotype-phenotype association mapping. A key component in TWAS is the prediction of gene expressions; and many statistical approaches have been developed along this line. However, a problem is that many genes have low expression heritability, limiting the performance of any predictive model. In this work, hypothesizing that appropriate denoising may improve the quality of expression data (including heritability), we propose AE-TWAS, which adds a transformation step before conducting standard TWAS. The transformation is composed of two steps by first splitting the whole transcriptome into co-expression networks (modules) and then using autoencoder (AE) to reconstruct the transcriptome data within each module. This transformation removes noise (including nonlinear ones) from the transcriptome data, paving the path for downstream TWAS. We showed two inspiring properties of AE-TWAS: (1) After transformation, the transcriptome data enjoy higher expression heritability at the low-heritability spectrum and possess higher connectivity within the modules. (2) The transferred transcriptome indeed enables better performance of TWAS; and moreover, the newly formed highly connected genes (i.e., hub genes) are more functionally relevant to diseases, evidenced by their functional annotations and overlap with TWAS hits.
Keywords:
Autoencoder
de-noising
heritability
hub genes
transcriptome-wide association studies

Journal

I
IEEE-ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
IF:
3.4
Papers:
3.3K
Citations:
6.4K

Organization

S
sir winston churchill high school
Scholars:
1
Papers: 1
Citations: 0
U
University of Calgary
Scholars:
3.8W
Papers: 3.3W
Citations: 52
U
University of Hawaii Cancer Center
Scholars:
81
Papers: 45
Citations: 1.8K
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