SummarizedExperiment
SummarizedExperiment
to DESeqDataSet
Resources: Anders, CSAMA, 2015; Love, CSAMA, 2015; Huber, CSAMA, 2015; Pimentel, YouTube, 2015.
HapMap samples from one facility, ordered by date of processing.
Confounding factors - Record or avoid
Artifacts of your particular protocols
Axes of variation
Application-specific, e.g.,
GenomicAlignments::summarizeOverlaps()
Rsubread::featureCount()
DESeq2 estimateSizeFactors()
, Anders and Huber, 2010
estimateDispersions()
Correlation between genomic copy number and mRNA expression identified 38 mis-labeled samples in the TCGA ovarian cancer Affymetrix microarray dataset.
This lab is derived from: RNA-Seq workflow: gene-level exploratory analysis and differential expression, by Michael Love, Simon Anders, Wolfgang Huber; modified by Martin Morgan, October 2015.
This lab will walk you through an end-to-end RNA-Seq differential expression workflow, using DESeq2 along with other Bioconductor packages. The complete work flow starts from the FASTQ files, but we will start after reads have been aligned to a reference genome and reads overlapping known genes have been counted. We will perform exploratory data analysis (EDA), differential gene expression analysis with DESeq2, and visually explore the results.
A number of other Bioconductor packages are important in statistical inference of differential expression at the gene level, including Rsubread, edgeR, limma, BaySeq, and others.
The data used in this workflow is an RNA-Seq experiment of airway smooth muscle cells treated with dexamethasone, a synthetic glucocorticoid steroid with anti-inflammatory effects. Glucocorticoids are used, for example, in asthma patients to prevent or reduce inflammation of the airways. In the experiment, four primary human airway smooth muscle cell lines were treated with 1 micromolar dexamethasone for 18 hours. For each of the four cell lines, we have a treated and an untreated sample. The reference for the experiment is:
Himes BE, Jiang X, Wagner P, Hu R, Wang Q, Klanderman B, Whitaker RM, Duan Q, Lasky-Su J, Nikolos C, Jester W, Johnson M, Panettieri R Jr, Tantisira KG, Weiss ST, Lu Q. “RNA-Seq Transcriptome Profiling Identifies CRISPLD2 as a Glucocorticoid Responsive Gene that Modulates Cytokine Function in Airway Smooth Muscle Cells.” PLoS One. 2014 Jun 13;9(6):e99625. PMID: 24926665. GEO: GSE52778.
As input, DESeq2 package expects count data as obtained, e.g., from RNA-Seq or another high-throughput sequencing experiment, in the form of a matrix of integer values. The value in the i-th row and the j-th column of the matrix tells how many reads have been mapped to gene i in sample j. Analogously, for other types of assays, the rows of the matrix might correspond e.g., to binding regions (with ChIP-Seq) or peptide sequences (with quantitative mass spectrometry).
The count values must be raw counts of sequencing reads. This is important for DESeq2’s statistical model to hold, as only the actual counts allow assessing the measurement precision correctly. Hence, please do not supply other quantities, such as (rounded) normalized counts, or counts of covered base pairs – this will only lead to nonsensical results.
We will discuss how to summarize data from BAM files to a count table later in the course. Here we’ll ‘jump right in’ and start with a prepared SummarizedExperiment
.
SummarizedExperiment
We now use R’s data()
command to load a prepared SummarizedExperiment
that was generated from the publicly available sequencing data files associated with the Himes et al. paper, described above. The steps we used to produce this object were equivalent to those you worked through in the previous sections, except that we used all the reads and all the genes. For more details on the exact steps used to create this object type vignette("airway")
into your R session.
library(airway)
data("airway")
se <- airway
The information in a SummarizedExperiment
object can be accessed with accessor functions. For example, to see the actual data, i.e., here, the read counts, we use the assay()
function. (The head()
function restricts the output to the first few lines.)
head(assay(se))
## SRR1039508 SRR1039509 SRR1039512 SRR1039513 SRR1039516
## ENSG00000000003 679 448 873 408 1138
## ENSG00000000005 0 0 0 0 0
## ENSG00000000419 467 515 621 365 587
## ENSG00000000457 260 211 263 164 245
## ENSG00000000460 60 55 40 35 78
## ENSG00000000938 0 0 2 0 1
## SRR1039517 SRR1039520 SRR1039521
## ENSG00000000003 1047 770 572
## ENSG00000000005 0 0 0
## ENSG00000000419 799 417 508
## ENSG00000000457 331 233 229
## ENSG00000000460 63 76 60
## ENSG00000000938 0 0 0
In this count matrix, each row represents an Ensembl gene, each column a sequenced RNA library, and the values give the raw numbers of sequencing reads that were mapped to the respective gene in each library. We also have metadata on each of the samples (the columns of the count matrix). If you’ve counted reads with some other software, you need to check at this step that the columns of the count matrix correspond to the rows of the column metadata.
We can quickly check the millions of fragments which uniquely aligned to the genes.
colSums(assay(se))
## SRR1039508 SRR1039509 SRR1039512 SRR1039513 SRR1039516 SRR1039517 SRR1039520
## 20637971 18809481 25348649 15163415 24448408 30818215 19126151
## SRR1039521
## 21164133
Supposing we have constructed a SummarizedExperiment
using one of the methods described in the previous section, we now need to make sure that the object contains all the necessary information about the samples, i.e., a table with metadata on the count matrix’s columns stored in the colData
slot:
colData(se)
## DataFrame with 8 rows and 9 columns
## SampleName cell dex albut Run avgLength
## <factor> <factor> <factor> <factor> <factor> <integer>
## SRR1039508 GSM1275862 N61311 untrt untrt SRR1039508 126
## SRR1039509 GSM1275863 N61311 trt untrt SRR1039509 126
## SRR1039512 GSM1275866 N052611 untrt untrt SRR1039512 126
## SRR1039513 GSM1275867 N052611 trt untrt SRR1039513 87
## SRR1039516 GSM1275870 N080611 untrt untrt SRR1039516 120
## SRR1039517 GSM1275871 N080611 trt untrt SRR1039517 126
## SRR1039520 GSM1275874 N061011 untrt untrt SRR1039520 101
## SRR1039521 GSM1275875 N061011 trt untrt SRR1039521 98
## Experiment Sample BioSample
## <factor> <factor> <factor>
## SRR1039508 SRX384345 SRS508568 SAMN02422669
## SRR1039509 SRX384346 SRS508567 SAMN02422675
## SRR1039512 SRX384349 SRS508571 SAMN02422678
## SRR1039513 SRX384350 SRS508572 SAMN02422670
## SRR1039516 SRX384353 SRS508575 SAMN02422682
## SRR1039517 SRX384354 SRS508576 SAMN02422673
## SRR1039520 SRX384357 SRS508579 SAMN02422683
## SRR1039521 SRX384358 SRS508580 SAMN02422677
Here we see that this object already contains an informative colData
slot – because we have already prepared it for you, as described in the airway vignette. However, when you work with your own data, you will have to add the pertinent sample / phenotypic information for the experiment at this stage. We highly recommend keeping this information in a comma-separated value (CSV) or tab-separated value (TSV) file, which can be exported from an Excel spreadsheet, and the assign this to the colData
slot, making sure that the rows correspond to the columns of the SummarizedExperiment
. We made sure of this correspondence by specifying the BAM files using a column of the sample table.
Check out the rowRanges()
of the summarized experiment; these are the genomic ranges over which counting occurred.
rowRanges(se)
## GRangesList object of length 64102:
## $ENSG00000000003
## GRanges object with 17 ranges and 2 metadata columns:
## seqnames ranges strand | exon_id exon_name
## <Rle> <IRanges> <Rle> | <integer> <character>
## [1] X [99883667, 99884983] - | 667145 ENSE00001459322
## [2] X [99885756, 99885863] - | 667146 ENSE00000868868
## [3] X [99887482, 99887565] - | 667147 ENSE00000401072
## [4] X [99887538, 99887565] - | 667148 ENSE00001849132
## [5] X [99888402, 99888536] - | 667149 ENSE00003554016
## ... ... ... ... . ... ...
## [13] X [99890555, 99890743] - | 667156 ENSE00003512331
## [14] X [99891188, 99891686] - | 667158 ENSE00001886883
## [15] X [99891605, 99891803] - | 667159 ENSE00001855382
## [16] X [99891790, 99892101] - | 667160 ENSE00001863395
## [17] X [99894942, 99894988] - | 667161 ENSE00001828996
##
## ...
## <64101 more elements>
## -------
## seqinfo: 722 sequences (1 circular) from an unspecified genome
SummarizedExperiment
to DESeqDataSet
We will use the DESeq2 package for assessing differential expression. The package uses an extended version of the SummarizedExperiment
class, called DESeqDataSet
. It’s easy to go from a SummarizedExperiment
to DESeqDataSet
:
library("DESeq2")
dds <- DESeqDataSet(se, design = ~ cell + dex)
The ‘design’ argument is a formula which expresses how the counts for each gene depend on the variables in colData
. Remember you can always get information on method arguments with ?
, e.g ?DESeqDataSet
.
It will be convenient to make sure that untrt
is the first level in the dex
factor, so that the default log2 fold changes are calculated as treated over untreated (by default R will chose the first alphabetical level, remember: computers don’t know what to do unless you tell them). The function relevel()
achieves this:
dds$dex <- relevel(dds$dex, "untrt")
In addition, if you have at any point subset the columns of the DESeqDataSet
you should similarly call droplevels()
on the factors if the subsetting has resulted in some levels having 0 samples.
Finally, we are ready to run the differential expression pipeline. With the data object prepared, the DESeq2 analysis can now be run with a single call to the function DESeq()
:
dds <- DESeq(dds)
## estimating size factors
## estimating dispersions
## gene-wise dispersion estimates
## mean-dispersion relationship
## final dispersion estimates
## fitting model and testing
This function will print out a message for the various steps it performs. These are described in more detail in the manual page ?DESeq
. Briefly these are: the estimation of size factors (which control for differences in the library size of the sequencing experiments), the estimation of dispersion for each gene, and fitting a generalized linear model.
A DESeqDataSet
is returned which contains all the fitted information within it, and the following section describes how to extract out result tables of interest from this object.
Calling results()
without any arguments will extract the estimated log2 fold changes and p values for the last variable in the design formula. If there are more than 2 levels for this variable, results()
will extract the results table for a comparison of the last level over the first level.
(res <- results(dds))
## log2 fold change (MLE): dex trt vs untrt
## Wald test p-value: dex trt vs untrt
## DataFrame with 64102 rows and 6 columns
## baseMean log2FoldChange lfcSE stat pvalue
## <numeric> <numeric> <numeric> <numeric> <numeric>
## ENSG00000000003 708.60217 -0.38125388 0.1006560 -3.7876928 0.0001520527
## ENSG00000000005 0.00000 NA NA NA NA
## ENSG00000000419 520.29790 0.20681271 0.1122218 1.8428925 0.0653447023
## ENSG00000000457 237.16304 0.03792050 0.1434532 0.2643405 0.7915175170
## ENSG00000000460 57.93263 -0.08816322 0.2871677 -0.3070095 0.7588361136
## ... ... ... ... ... ...
## LRG_94 0 NA NA NA NA
## LRG_96 0 NA NA NA NA
## LRG_97 0 NA NA NA NA
## LRG_98 0 NA NA NA NA
## LRG_99 0 NA NA NA NA
## padj
## <numeric>
## ENSG00000000003 0.001283937
## ENSG00000000005 NA
## ENSG00000000419 0.196568379
## ENSG00000000457 0.911483176
## ENSG00000000460 0.895073113
## ... ...
## LRG_94 NA
## LRG_96 NA
## LRG_97 NA
## LRG_98 NA
## LRG_99 NA
As res
is a DataFrame
object, it carries metadata with information on the meaning of the columns:
mcols(res, use.names=TRUE)
## DataFrame with 6 rows and 2 columns
## type description
## <character> <character>
## baseMean intermediate mean of normalized counts for all samples
## log2FoldChange results log2 fold change (MLE): dex trt vs untrt
## lfcSE results standard error: dex trt vs untrt
## stat results Wald statistic: dex trt vs untrt
## pvalue results Wald test p-value: dex trt vs untrt
## padj results BH adjusted p-values
The first column, baseMean
, is a just the average of the normalized count values, dividing by size factors, taken over all samples. The remaining four columns refer to a specific contrast, namely the comparison of the trt
level over the untrt
level for the factor variable dex
. See the help page for results()
(by typing ?results
) for information on how to obtain other contrasts.
The column log2FoldChange
is the effect size estimate. It tells us how much the gene’s expression seems to have changed due to treatment with dexamethasone in comparison to untreated samples. This value is reported on a logarithmic scale to base 2: for example, a log2 fold change of 1.5 means that the gene’s expression is increased by a multiplicative factor of \(2^{1.5} \approx 2.82\).
Of course, this estimate has an uncertainty associated with it, which is available in the column lfcSE
, the standard error estimate for the log2 fold change estimate. We can also express the uncertainty of a particular effect size estimate as the result of a statistical test. The purpose of a test for differential expression is to test whether the data provides sufficient evidence to conclude that this value is really different from zero. DESeq2 performs for each gene a hypothesis test to see whether evidence is sufficient to decide against the null hypothesis that there is no effect of the treatment on the gene and that the observed difference between treatment and control was merely caused by experimental variability (i.e., the type of variability that you can just as well expect between different samples in the same treatment group). As usual in statistics, the result of this test is reported as a p value, and it is found in the column pvalue
. (Remember that a p value indicates the probability that a fold change as strong as the observed one, or even stronger, would be seen under the situation described by the null hypothesis.)
We can also summarize the results with the following line of code, which reports some additional information.
summary(res)
##
## out of 33469 with nonzero total read count
## adjusted p-value < 0.1
## LFC > 0 (up) : 2604, 7.8%
## LFC < 0 (down) : 2212, 6.6%
## outliers [1] : 0, 0%
## low counts [2] : 15441, 46%
## (mean count < 5)
## [1] see 'cooksCutoff' argument of ?results
## [2] see 'independentFiltering' argument of ?results
Note that there are many genes with differential expression due to dexamethasone treatment at the FDR level of 10%. This makes sense, as the smooth muscle cells of the airway are known to react to glucocorticoid steroids. However, there are two ways to be more strict about which set of genes are considered significant:
padj
in the results table)lfcThreshold
argument of results()
. See the DESeq2 vignette for a demonstration of the use of this argument.Sometimes a subset of the p values in res
will be NA
(“not available”). This is DESeq()
’s way of reporting that all counts for this gene were zero, and hence not test was applied. In addition, p values can be assigned NA
if the gene was excluded from analysis because it contained an extreme count outlier. For more information, see the outlier detection section of the vignette.
Novices in high-throughput biology often assume that thresholding these p values at a low value, say 0.05, as is often done in other settings, would be appropriate – but it is not. We briefly explain why:
There are 5676 genes with a p value below 0.05 among the 33469 genes, for which the test succeeded in reporting a p value:
sum(res$pvalue < 0.05, na.rm=TRUE)
## [1] 5676
sum(!is.na(res$pvalue))
## [1] 33469
Now, assume for a moment that the null hypothesis is true for all genes, i.e., no gene is affected by the treatment with dexamethasone. Then, by the definition of p value, we expect up to 5% of the genes to have a p value below 0.05. This amounts to 1673 genes. If we just considered the list of genes with a p value below 0.05 as differentially expressed, this list should therefore be expected to contain up to 1673 / 5676 = 29% false positives.
DESeq2 uses the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) adjustment as described in the base R p.adjust function; in brief, this method calculates for each gene an adjusted p value which answers the following question: if one called significant all genes with a p value less than or equal to this gene’s p value threshold, what would be the fraction of false positives (the false discovery rate, FDR) among them (in the sense of the calculation outlined above)? These values, called the BH-adjusted p values, are given in the column padj
of the res
object.
Hence, if we consider a fraction of 10% false positives acceptable, we can consider all genes with an adjusted p value below \(10% = 0.1\) as significant. How many such genes are there?
sum(res$padj < 0.1, na.rm=TRUE)
## [1] 4816
We subset the results table to these genes and then sort it by the log2 fold change estimate to get the significant genes with the strongest down-regulation.
resSig <- subset(res, padj < 0.1)
head(resSig[ order( resSig$log2FoldChange ), ])
## log2 fold change (MLE): dex trt vs untrt
## Wald test p-value: dex trt vs untrt
## DataFrame with 6 rows and 6 columns
## baseMean log2FoldChange lfcSE stat pvalue
## <numeric> <numeric> <numeric> <numeric> <numeric>
## ENSG00000128285 6.624741 -5.325912 1.2578863 -4.234017 2.295537e-05
## ENSG00000267339 26.233573 -4.611553 0.6731316 -6.850894 7.338997e-12
## ENSG00000019186 14.087605 -4.325920 0.8578247 -5.042895 4.585398e-07
## ENSG00000183454 5.804171 -4.264087 1.1669498 -3.654045 2.581412e-04
## ENSG00000146006 46.807597 -4.211875 0.5288797 -7.963767 1.668799e-15
## ENSG00000141469 53.436528 -4.124784 1.1297977 -3.650905 2.613174e-04
## padj
## <numeric>
## ENSG00000128285 2.382495e-04
## ENSG00000267339 2.057658e-10
## ENSG00000019186 6.623843e-06
## ENSG00000183454 2.051926e-03
## ENSG00000146006 7.180217e-14
## ENSG00000141469 2.073517e-03
…and with the strongest up-regulation. The order()
function gives the indices in increasing order, so a simple way to ask for decreasing order is to add a -
sign. Alternatively, you can use the argument decreasing=TRUE
.
head(resSig[ order( -resSig$log2FoldChange ), ])
## log2 fold change (MLE): dex trt vs untrt
## Wald test p-value: dex trt vs untrt
## DataFrame with 6 rows and 6 columns
## baseMean log2FoldChange lfcSE stat pvalue
## <numeric> <numeric> <numeric> <numeric> <numeric>
## ENSG00000179593 67.243048 9.505972 1.0545111 9.014578 1.976299e-19
## ENSG00000109906 385.071029 7.352628 0.5363902 13.707610 9.141988e-43
## ENSG00000250978 56.318194 6.327393 0.6778153 9.334981 1.010098e-20
## ENSG00000132518 5.654654 5.885113 1.3241367 4.444491 8.810031e-06
## ENSG00000127954 286.384119 5.207160 0.4930828 10.560419 4.546302e-26
## ENSG00000249364 8.839061 5.098168 1.1596852 4.396166 1.101798e-05
## padj
## <numeric>
## ENSG00000179593 1.254532e-17
## ENSG00000109906 2.257695e-40
## ENSG00000250978 7.226210e-19
## ENSG00000132518 1.002065e-04
## ENSG00000127954 5.059304e-24
## ENSG00000249364 1.226124e-04
A quick way to visualize the counts for a particular gene is to use the plotCounts()
function, which takes as arguments the DESeqDataSet
, a gene name, and the group over which to plot the counts.
topGene <- rownames(res)[which.min(res$padj)]
data <- plotCounts(dds, gene=topGene, intgroup=c("dex"), returnData=TRUE)
We can also make more customizable plots using the ggplot()
function from the ggplot2 package:
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(data, aes(x=dex, y=count, fill=dex)) +
scale_y_log10() +
geom_dotplot(binaxis="y", stackdir="center")
## `stat_bindot()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.