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. 2023 Mar 9:11:1065586.
doi: 10.3389/fcell.2023.1065586. eCollection 2023.

Geographically weighted linear combination test for gene-set analysis of a continuous spatial phenotype as applied to intratumor heterogeneity

Affiliations

Geographically weighted linear combination test for gene-set analysis of a continuous spatial phenotype as applied to intratumor heterogeneity

Payam Amini et al. Front Cell Dev Biol. .

Abstract

Background: The impact of gene-sets on a spatial phenotype is not necessarily uniform across different locations of cancer tissue. This study introduces a computational platform, GWLCT, for combining gene set analysis with spatial data modeling to provide a new statistical test for location-specific association of phenotypes and molecular pathways in spatial single-cell RNA-seq data collected from an input tumor sample. Methods: The main advantage of GWLCT consists of an analysis beyond global significance, allowing the association between the gene-set and the phenotype to vary across the tumor space. At each location, the most significant linear combination is found using a geographically weighted shrunken covariance matrix and kernel function. Whether a fixed or adaptive bandwidth is determined based on a cross-validation cross procedure. Our proposed method is compared to the global version of linear combination test (LCT), bulk and random-forest based gene-set enrichment analyses using data created by the Visium Spatial Gene Expression technique on an invasive breast cancer tissue sample, as well as 144 different simulation scenarios. Results: In an illustrative example, the new geographically weighted linear combination test, GWLCT, identifies the cancer hallmark gene-sets that are significantly associated at each location with the five spatially continuous phenotypic contexts in the tumors defined by different well-known markers of cancer-associated fibroblasts. Scan statistics revealed clustering in the number of significant gene-sets. A spatial heatmap of combined significance over all selected gene-sets is also produced. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms other methods in the considered scenarios, especially when the spatial association increases. Conclusion: Our proposed approach considers the spatial covariance of gene expression to detect the most significant gene-sets affecting a continuous phenotype. It reveals spatially detailed information in tissue space and can thus play a key role in understanding the contextual heterogeneity of cancer cells.

Keywords: Spatial single cell analysis; cancer-associated fibroblast; gene-set analysis; geographically weighted regression; intratumor heterogeneity; linear combination test.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Scan statistics are used to detect and demarcate the putative clusters of cells which are enriched with selected gene-sets. The spatial clusters are defined on the tumor space by a scan statistic based on a Poisson distribution. At the locations where the scan statistics exceed a pre-specified threshold, the detected clusters for each phenotype are shown in white.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
The interactive plots (3D) for the 5 phenotypes at Low, Medium and High CAF levels. Further information about the number and the name of significant gene-sets at each location can be obtained by rotating, zooming, and clicking each dot. The green, orange and blue dots reflect high, low, and medium CAF levels. (This figure is an illustrative static snapshot of the interactive 3D plots accessible online at https://mortezahaji.github.io/GWLCT-Project/.)
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
A snapshot of the 3D plot for COL11A1 at high CAF level. The number of significant gene-sets are shown in 8 colors (based on 8 gene-sets). The interactive plots can be accessed at: https://mortezahaji.github.io/GWLCT-Project/.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
2D plots indicating the number of significant gene-sets across the tumor space for COL11A1 at high CAF level.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
The spatial heatmap shows the Combined Significance (CS) of association of the 8 hallmarks with the COL11A1 phenotype at high CAF level. Bigger the value of CS at a location, the corresponding point is shown in darker red.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Comparing the average statistical power of each method across various levels of simulation parameters. Considering GWLCT as the reference category and using Dunnett’s test, we compared the average power of GWLCT (green) against Bulk GSEA (red), LCT (blue) and RF-GSEA (purple) by varying from Low to Moderate to High levels of the following parameters: (A) the kernel bandwidth, (B) the number of coordinate points, (C) the number of genes, (D) gene-set probability (size of gene-sets), (E) the spatial association between genes and continuous phenotype, and (F) the spatial association between genes. For detailed interpretation of the results in terms of the testing significance given by the p-values, see text.

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Grants and funding

This research was supported by a Fellowship from Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Accelerate program (grant number: RES0047324, recipient: ID).

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