Normalized coefficient of variation (nCV): a method to evaluate circadian clock robustness in population scale data

Robust oscillation of clock genes is a core feature of the circadian system. Relative amplitude (rAMP) measures the robustness of clock gene oscillations but only works for longitudinal samples. We lack a method for estimating robust oscillations from human samples without labeled time. We show that the normalized coefficient of variation (nCV) of 10 clock genes is linearly correlated with their normalized rAMP, independent of time labels. We found that the mean nCV of clock genes are consistently decreased in tumors compared to nontumors, suggesting a new therapeutic target in cancer treatment by enhancing clock robustness. nCV can provide a simple measure of the clock robustness in population-level datasets.

The nCV package (https://github.com/gangwug/nCV) and web application (https://github.com/gangwug/nCVapp) are available on the GitHub repository.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.