Multi-tissue Analysis of Co-expression Networks by Higher-Order Generalized Singular Value Decomposition Identifies Functionally Coherent Transcriptional Modules

Recent high-throughput efforts such as ENCODE have generated a large body of genome-scale transcriptional data in multiple conditions (e.g., cell-types and disease states). Leveraging these data is especially important for network-based approaches to human disease, for instance to identify coherent transcriptional modules (subnetworks) that can inform functional disease mechanisms and pathological pathways. Yet, genome-scale network analysis across conditions is significantly hampered by the paucity of robust and computationally-efficient methods. Building on the Higher-Order Generalized Singular Value Decomposition, we introduce a new algorithmic approach for efficient, parameter-free and reproducible identification of network-modules simultaneously across multiple conditions. Our method can accommodate weighted (and unweighted) networks of any size and can similarly use co-expression or raw gene expression input data, without hinging upon the definition and stability of the correlation used to assess gene co-expression. In simulation studies, we demonstrated distinctive advantages of our method over existing methods, which was able to recover accurately both common and condition-specific network-modules without entailing ad-hoc input parameters as required by other approaches. We applied our method to genome-scale and multi-tissue transcriptomic datasets from rats (microarray-based) and humans (mRNA-sequencing-based) and identified several common and tissue-specific subnetworks with functional significance, which were not detected by other methods. In humans we recapitulated the crosstalk between cell-cycle progression and cell-extracellular matrix interactions processes in ventricular zones during neocortex expansion and further, we uncovered pathways related to development of later cognitive functions in the cortical plate of the developing brain which were previously unappreciated. Analyses of seven rat tissues identified a multi-tissue subnetwork of co-expressed heat shock protein (Hsp) and cardiomyopathy genes (Bag3, Cryab, Kras, Emd, Plec), which was significantly replicated using separate failing heart and liver gene expression datasets in humans, thus revealing a conserved functional role for Hsp genes in cardiovascular disease.Author Summary: Complex biological interactions and processes can be modelled as networks, for instance metabolic pathways or protein-protein interactions. The growing availability of large high-throughput data in several experimental conditions now permits the full-scale analysis of biological interactions and processes. However, no reliable and computationally efficient methods for simultaneous analysis of multiple large-scale interaction datasets (networks) have been developed to date. To overcome this shortcoming, we have developed a new computational framework that is parameter-free, computationally efficient and highly reliable. We showed how these distinctive properties make it a useful tool for real genomic data exploration and analyses. Indeed, in extensive simulation studies and real-data analyses we have demonstrated that our method outperformed existing approaches in terms of efficiency and, most importantly, reproducibility of the results. Beyond the computational advantages, we illustrated how our method can be effectively applied to leverage the vast stream of genome-scale transcriptional data that has risen exponentially over the last years. In contrast with existing approaches, using our method we were able to identify and replicate multi-tissue gene co-expression networks that were associated with specific functional processes relevant to phenotypic variation and disease in rats and humans.