Abstract
Circadian clocks play a key role in regulating a vast array of biological processes, with significant implications for human health. Accurate assessment of physiological time using transcriptional biomarkers found in human blood can significantly improve diagnosis of circadian disorders and optimize the delivery time of therapeutic treatments. To be useful, such a test must be accurate, minimally burdensome to the patient, and readily generalizable to new data. A major obstacle in development of gene expression biomarker tests is the diversity of measurement platforms and the inherent variability of the data, often resulting in predictors that perform well in the original datasets but cannot be universally applied to new samples collected in other settings. Here, we introduce TimeSignature, an algorithm that robustly infers circadian time from gene expression. We demonstrate its application in data from three independent studies using distinct microarrays and further validate it against a new set of samples profiled by RNA-sequencing. Our results show that TimeSignature is more accurate and efficient than competing methods, estimating circadian time to within 2 h for the majority of samples. Importantly, we demonstrate that once trained on data from a single study, the resulting predictor can be universally applied to yield highly accurate results in new data from other studies independent of differences in study population, patient protocol, or assay platform without renormalizing the data or retraining. This feature is unique among expression-based predictors and addresses a major challenge in the development of generalizable, clinically useful tests.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | E9247-E9256 |
Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
Volume | 115 |
Issue number | 39 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 25 2018 |
Funding
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. R.B. and M.I. were supported by Complex Systems Scholar Award 220020394 from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. All authors were supported by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grant D15AP00027. Additional funding was provided by the North-western Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine. This effort was in part sponsored by DARPA; the content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
Keywords
- Circadian rhythms
- Cross-platform prediction
- Gene expression dynamics
- Machine learning
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General