Mapping transcription mechanisms from multimodal genomic data
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Updated: Jun 7, 2026

Generating the Transcriptional Regulation View of Transcriptomic Features for Prediction Task and Dark Biomarker Detection on Small Datasets
Published on: March 1, 2024
Hsun-Hsien Chang1, Michael McGeachie, Gil Alterovitz
1Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. hsun-hsien.chang@childrens.harvard.edu
Background:
Identification of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) is an emerging area in genomic study. The task requires an integrated analysis of genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data and gene expression data, raising a new computational challenge due to the tremendous size of data.
Results:
We develop a method to identify eQTLs. The method represents eQTLs as information flux between genetic variants and transcripts. We use information theory to simultaneously interrogate SNP and gene expression data, resulting in a Transcriptional Information Map (TIM) which captures the network of transcriptional information that links genetic variations, gene expression and regulatory mechanisms. These maps are able to identify both cis- and trans- regulating eQTLs. The application on a dataset of leukemia patients identifies eQTLs in the regions of the GART, PCP4, DSCAM, and RIPK4 genes that regulate ADAMTS1, a known leukemia correlate.
Conclusions:
The information theory approach presented in this paper is able to infer the dependence networks between SNPs and transcripts, which in turn can identify cis- and trans-eQTLs. The application of our method to the leukemia study explains how genetic variants and gene expression are linked to leukemia.
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