Abstract 5032: Data driven refinement of gene signatures for enrichment analysis and cell state characterization

Abstract

Abstract In the study of human disease, the use of gene expression data has been crucial to the functional characterization of changes in molecular pathway activity and for identifying targets for novel treatments. However, the interpretation of this data is often complicated by its high dimensionality and the difficulty of identifying biological signals within a list of differentially expressed genes. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) is a community standard method for identifying pathway enrichment in gene expression data by testing whether a set of genes whose expression would indicate the activity of a specific process or phenotype are coordinately up- or downregulated more than would be expected by chance. As GSEA relies on high quality gene sets with coordinately regulated member genes, we maintain the Molecular Signatures Database (MSigDB) which contains 9 collections of curated, annotated gene sets representing different biological pathways and processes. Over time, we have observed that some of the MSigDB gene sets, especially those that are manually curated or defined in a very specific biological context, may not provide a sensitive and specific enough co-regulation signature for their corresponding phenotype. In response, we have created a data-driven, matrix-factorization-based refinement method to build more sensitive and specific gene sets. This method incorporates large-scale datasets from multiple sources including compendia such as the Cancer Dependency Map as well as curated protein-protein interaction networks. We will present the initial results of this refinement method as well as our ongoing work which will yield a new collection of refined gene sets that will be made freely available in MSigDB for use with GSEA and many other applications. Citation Format: Alexander T. Wenzel, Pablo Tamayo, Jill P. Mesirov. Data driven refinement of gene signatures for enrichment analysis and cell state characterization [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 5032.