Examining an experiment in mouse embryogenesis.

1 Introduction

I am coming into this project in a state of perfect ignorance. Carrie kindly sent me a few or two yesterday but I have yet to open the email and start reading them.

The only things I know for certain:

1. There are ~ 24 samples with names prefixed with ‘A’ ‘B’ and ‘C’, corresponding to three time point collections at 10.5, 13.5, and 15.5 days. I am going to call these d10,d13,d15.
2. The most likely reference is the ensembl house mouse mm39; though the real reference is actually the charles river CD-1. I was reasonably certain yesterday that it is possible to download this mouse line’s reference, but I think that is untrue – or at least my attempts to find it failed. At this time I am not certain which samples are which mouse line.
3. The sequence libraries are likely in the reverse orientation. At least that was my assumption.

The document ‘preprocess.Rmd’ outlines the commands I ran. I used my pipeline’s Process_RNASeq function, which trims, runs fastqc, kraken, hisat, and htseq by default.

2 Metadata

I received a complete sample sheet from either Najib or Carrie and modified it slightly to match the places where I put the raw data. I then copied it to ‘sample_sheets/all_samples.xlsx’ so that I need not worry about messing up the original.

My function ‘gather_preprocessing_metadata()’ has defaults which should provide some helpful new columns in this metadata sheet. Upon completion, it should write a new copy of the same file with a suffix ’_modified.xlsx’.

FIXME: modify the function to detect columns with dates and make sure to keep the encoding the same. FIXED! FIXME: Najib changed his template and added a new first row, add a check against that - or just delete the row manually. FIXED! FIXME: Set the default significant digits back to NULL, having all these darn .000’s is annoying. FIXED!

modified <- gather_preprocessing_metadata("sample_sheets/all_samples.xlsx")

## Did not find the condition column in the sample sheet.

## Filling it in as undefined.

## Did not find the batch column in the sample sheet.

## Filling it in as undefined.

## Skipping for now

## Writing new metadata to: sample_sheets/all_samples_modified.xlsx

## Deleting the file sample_sheets/all_samples_modified.xlsx before writing the tables.

I immediately learned that I somehow forgot to process the first sample!? It is processing now, I have no clue how that happened.

3 Annotations

load_biomart_annotations, if not told anything else, will connect to ensembl and attempt to download the most commonly requested annotations for homo_sapiens from the archive server 2 years before the current date. This is because, as a general rule, I use genomes which are ~ 2-3 years old.

I am also downloading the ontology data, though most tools are aware of Mus.

In addition, I will load the gff annotations from the gff file used to count the genes, just in case there are some mismatches between the ensembl and gff gene IDs.

annot <- load_biomart_annotations(species = "mmusculus", year = 2022, month = 7)

## The biomart annotations file already exists, loading from it.

gene_annotations <- annot[["gene_annotations"]]

go_db <- load_biomart_go(species = "mmusculus", year = 2022, month = 7)

## The biomart annotations file already exists, loading from it.

gff_annot <- load_gff_annotations("~/libraries/genome/mm38_100.gff", id_col = "gene_id")

## Returning a df with 32 columns and 3899382 rows.

4 Initial expressionset

The experimental metadata now includes the count table filenames and I have a reasonable set of gene annotations. I should be able therefore the merge them all into an expressionset and/or summarizedExperiment.

mm_expt <- create_expt(modified[["new_file"]],
                       gene_info = gene_annotations,
                       annotation = "org.Mm.eg.db",
                       file_column = "hisatcounttable") %>%
  set_expt_conditions(fact = "time") %>%
  set_expt_batches(fact = "datecategorical")

## Reading the sample metadata.

## The sample definitions comprises: 17 rows(samples) and 46 columns(metadata fields).

## Matched 25760 annotations and counts.

## Bringing together the count matrix and gene information.

## Saving the expressionset to 'expt.rda'.

## The final expressionset has 25760 features and 17 samples.

## The numbers of samples by condition are:

## 
## d10 d13 d15 
##   5   6   6

## The number of samples by batch are:

## 
## b1 b2 b3 b4 
## 11  2  2  2

written <- write_expt(expt, excel = glue("excel/all_samples-v{ver}.xlsx"))

## Error in (function (classes, fdef, mtable) : unable to find an inherited method for function 'exprs' for signature '"function"'

5 Poke at it

plot_libsize(mm_expt)

## Library sizes of 17 samples, 
## ranging from 27,324,171 to 69,203,380.

plot_nonzero(mm_expt)

## The following samples have less than 16744 genes.

## [1] "A1" "A2" "A5" "B1" "B3" "B4"

## Scale for colour is already present.
## Adding another scale for colour, which will replace the existing scale.

## Scale for fill is already present.
## Adding another scale for fill, which will replace the existing scale.
## A non-zero genes plot of 17 samples.
## These samples have an average 37.06 CPM coverage and 16818 genes observed, ranging from 16399 to
## 17275.

norm <- normalize_expt(mm_expt, transform = "log2", convert = "cpm",
                       norm = "quant", filter = TRUE)

## Removing 12303 low-count genes (13457 remaining).
## transform_counts: Found 57 values equal to 0, adding 1 to the matrix.

plot_corheat(norm)

## A heatmap of pairwise sample correlations ranging from: 
## 0.745893022508784 to 0.996487658158264.

plot_disheat(norm)

## A heatmap of pairwise sample distances ranging from: 
## 19.647203152876 to 167.113181354411.

plot_pca(norm)

## The result of performing a fast_svd dimension reduction.
## The x-axis is PC1 and the y-axis is PC2
## Colors are defined by d10, d13, d15
## Shapes are defined by b1, b2, b3, b4.

Holy ass crackers! I am not sure I have ever had a dataset which split this coherently. I need better names than ‘A’ ‘B’ ‘C’.

Ok, I will just do a no-batch DE because I am not sure of the actual batches and/or surrogates, and who cares the data split so well I am worried (not really) it is simulated.

Oh, before I forget, April has been asking about rRNA content. I think I quantified that?

5.1 Check the rRNA content

No, it appears I didn’t submit rRNA queries. Lets do that now before I forget.

cd preprocessing
start=$(pwd)
for i in A* B* C*; do
    cd $i
    cyoa --method hisat --species mm38_100 --libtype rRNA --gff_type misc_feature --gff_tag ID \
         --input $(/bin/ls *-trimmed.fastq.xz | tr '\n' ':' | sed 's/:$//g')
    cd $start
done

I checked the logs for a few samples and it looks like the rRNA content is less than 1% in most(all?) of the samples.

6 varpart

varpart <- simple_varpart(mm_expt)

## Subsetting on genes.

## remove_genes_expt(), before removal, there were 18857 genes, now there are 17392.

## 
## Total:175 s

varpart

## The result of using variancePartition with the model:
## ~ condition + batch

7 GSVA

Since I have not read the kindly-sent reviews, I will cheat a little and use GSVA to get some ideas about potential papers. I default to C2 which is likely not the right gene set list.

I just downloaded the new msigdb, let us use that instead of the much less interesting GSVAdata set. Frustratingly, the new version of MSigDB provides invalid XML (there are apparently ‘<’ characters in the text fields of this file, which is explicitly forbidden in the XML standard), so I wrote a function to read the annotations from the SQLite database.

FIXME: I need to do some work to clean up the IDs with this new function.

mm_gsva <- simple_gsva(mm_expt, orgdb = "org.Mm.eg.db", signature_category = "c2",
                       msig_db =  "reference/msigdb_v2023.2.Mm/msigdb_v2023.2.Mm.db",
                       signatures = "reference/msigdb_v2023.2.Mm/m2.all.v2023.2.Mm.entrez.gmt")

## Converting the rownames() of the expressionset to ENTREZID.

## 4032 ENSEMBL ID's didn't have a matching ENTEREZ ID. Dropping them now.

## Before conversion, the expressionset has 25760 entries.

## Subsetting on genes.

## remove_genes_expt(), before removal, there were 25760 genes, now there are 21669.

## After conversion, the expressionset has 21669 entries.

## Adding descriptions and IDs to the gene set annotations.

## Adding annotations from reference/msigdb_v2023.2.Mm/msigdb_v2023.2.Mm.db.

## Not subsetting the msigdb metadata, the wanted_meta argument was NULL.

mm_gsva

## GSVA result using method: ssgsea against the c2 dataset.
## Scores range from: -0.4357 to: 0.5643.

mm_gsva_sig <- get_sig_gsva_categories(mm_gsva)

## Starting limma pairwise comparison.

## libsize was not specified, this parameter has profound effects on limma's result.

## Using the libsize from expt$libsize.

## Limma step 1/6: choosing model.

## Assuming this data is similar to a micro array and not performign voom.

## Limma step 3/6: running lmFit with method: ls.

## Limma step 4/6: making and fitting contrasts with no intercept. (~ 0 + factors)

## Limma step 5/6: Running eBayes with robust = FALSE and trend = FALSE.

## Limma step 6/6: Writing limma outputs.

## Limma step 6/6: 1/3: Creating table: d13_vs_d10.  Adjust = BH

## Limma step 6/6: 2/3: Creating table: d15_vs_d10.  Adjust = BH

## Limma step 6/6: 3/3: Creating table: d15_vs_d13.  Adjust = BH

## Limma step 6/6: 1/3: Creating table: d10.  Adjust = BH

## Limma step 6/6: 2/3: Creating table: d13.  Adjust = BH

## Limma step 6/6: 3/3: Creating table: d15.  Adjust = BH

## The factor d10 has 5 rows.

## The factor d13 has 6 rows.

## The factor d15 has 6 rows.

## Testing each factor against the others.

## Scoring d10 against everything else.

## Scoring d13 against everything else.

## Scoring d15 against everything else.

## Deleting the file excel/gsva_subset.xlsx before writing the tables.

mm_gsva_sig

## The set of GSVA categories deemed significantly higher than the
## distribution of all scores.  It comprises 54 gene sets.

mm_gsva_sig$score_pca

8 Kraken matrix

Come back to this, note to self the previous iteration was explicitly looking for Pseudomonas contamination.

genus_expt <- create_expt(gathered[["new_file"]],
                          file_column = "krakenmatrix", file_type = "table")
genus_norm <- normalize_expt(genus_expt, convert = "cpm")
plot_disheat(genus_norm)
genus_normv2 <- normalize_expt(genus_expt, convert = "cpm", transform = "log2")
plot_pca(genus_normv2)
plot_libsize(genus_expt)
head(exprs(genus_expt))
exprs(genus_expt)["Pseudomonas", ]

9 Differential Expression

Until I get more meaningful condition names, I will just do B/A C/A C/B

keepers <- list(
  "d13_vs_d10" = c("d13", "d10"),
  "d15_vs_d10" = c("d15", "d10"),
  "d15_vs_d13" = c("d15", "d13"))
de <- all_pairwise(mm_expt, filter = TRUE, model_batch = FALSE)

## 
## d10 d13 d15 
##   5   6   6

tables <- combine_de_tables(
  de, keepers = keepers, excel = glue("excel/de_tables-v{ver}.xlsx"))

## Deleting the file excel/de_tables-v20240206.xlsx before writing the tables.

sig <- extract_significant_genes(
  tables, according_to = "deseq", excel = glue("excel/de_sig-v{ver}.xlsx"))

## Deleting the file excel/de_sig-v20240206.xlsx before writing the tables.

10 Ontology enrichment

mm38 is nicely supported in gProfiler/clusterProfiler.

all_gp <- all_gprofiler(sig, species = "mmusculus")
all_gp

## Running gProfiler on every set of significant genes found:

##                   GO KEGG REAC WP  TF MIRNA HPA CORUM HP
## d13_vs_d10_up   1329    4   14  2 483     0   0     0  0
## d13_vs_d10_down 1296    9   58  1 407     0   0     0  0
## d15_vs_d10_up   1484    5    9  0 524     0   0     0  0
## d15_vs_d10_down 1374   11   80  2 489     0   0     0  0
## d15_vs_d13_up    656    3    3  0 146     0   0     0  1
## d15_vs_d13_down  168    0    0  0  36     0   0     0  0

all_gp[["d13_vs_d10_up"]]

## A set of ontologies produced by gprofiler using 2437
## genes against the mmusculus annotations and significance cutoff 0.05.
## There are 1329 GO hits, 4, KEGG hits, 14 reactome hits, 2 wikipathway hits, 483 transcription factor hits, 0 miRNA hits, 0 HPA hits, 0 HP hits, and 0 CORUM hits.

## Category MF is the most populated with 30 hits.

all_gp[["d13_vs_d10_down"]]

## A set of ontologies produced by gprofiler using 1497
## genes against the mmusculus annotations and significance cutoff 0.05.
## There are 1296 GO hits, 9, KEGG hits, 58 reactome hits, 1 wikipathway hits, 407 transcription factor hits, 0 miRNA hits, 0 HPA hits, 0 HP hits, and 0 CORUM hits.
## Category MF is the most populated with 30 hits.

all_gp[["d15_vs_d10_up"]]

## A set of ontologies produced by gprofiler using 2916
## genes against the mmusculus annotations and significance cutoff 0.05.
## There are 1484 GO hits, 5, KEGG hits, 9 reactome hits, 0 wikipathway hits, 524 transcription factor hits, 0 miRNA hits, 0 HPA hits, 0 HP hits, and 0 CORUM hits.
## Category MF is the most populated with 30 hits.

all_gp[["d15_vs_d10_down"]]

## A set of ontologies produced by gprofiler using 1840
## genes against the mmusculus annotations and significance cutoff 0.05.
## There are 1374 GO hits, 11, KEGG hits, 80 reactome hits, 2 wikipathway hits, 489 transcription factor hits, 0 miRNA hits, 0 HPA hits, 0 HP hits, and 0 CORUM hits.
## Category MF is the most populated with 30 hits.

all_gp[["d15_vs_d13_up"]]

## A set of ontologies produced by gprofiler using 753
## genes against the mmusculus annotations and significance cutoff 0.05.
## There are 656 GO hits, 3, KEGG hits, 3 reactome hits, 0 wikipathway hits, 146 transcription factor hits, 0 miRNA hits, 0 HPA hits, 1 HP hits, and 0 CORUM hits.
## Category MF is the most populated with 30 hits.

all_gp[["d15_vs_d13_down"]]

## A set of ontologies produced by gprofiler using 199
## genes against the mmusculus annotations and significance cutoff 0.05.
## There are 168 GO hits, 0, KEGG hits, 0 reactome hits, 0 wikipathway hits, 36 transcription factor hits, 0 miRNA hits, 0 HPA hits, 0 HP hits, and 0 CORUM hits.

## Category BP is the most populated with 30 hits.

## all_cp <- all_clusterprofiler(sig, species = "mmusculus")