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. 2018 Feb 22;13(2):e0191227.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191227. eCollection 2018.

Integration of machine learning and meta-analysis identifies the transcriptomic bio-signature of mastitis disease in cattle

Affiliations

Integration of machine learning and meta-analysis identifies the transcriptomic bio-signature of mastitis disease in cattle

Somayeh Sharifi et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Gram-negative bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) are assumed to be among the main agents that cause severe mastitis disease with clinical signs in dairy cattle. Rapid detection of this disease is so important in order to prevent transmission to other cows and helps to reduce inappropriate use of antibiotics. With the rapid progress in high-throughput technologies, and accumulation of various kinds of '-omics' data in public repositories, there is an opportunity to retrieve, integrate, and reanalyze these resources to improve the diagnosis and treatment of different diseases and to provide mechanistic insights into host resistance in an efficient way. Meta-analysis is a relatively inexpensive option with good potential to increase the statistical power and generalizability of single-study analysis. In the current meta-analysis research, six microarray-based studies that investigate the transcriptome profile of mammary gland tissue after induced mastitis by E. coli infection were used. This meta-analysis not only reinforced the findings in individual studies, but also several novel terms including responses to hypoxia, response to drug, anti-apoptosis and positive regulation of transcription from RNA polymerase II promoter enriched by up-regulated genes. Finally, in order to identify the small sets of genes that are sufficiently informative in E. coli mastitis, the differentially expressed gene introduced by meta-analysis were prioritized by using ten different attribute weighting algorithms. Twelve meta-genes were detected by the majority of attribute weighting algorithms (with weight above 0.7) as most informative genes including CXCL8 (IL8), NFKBIZ, HP, ZC3H12A, PDE4B, CASP4, CXCL2, CCL20, GRO1(CXCL1), CFB, S100A9, and S100A8. Interestingly, the results have been demonstrated that all of these genes are the key genes in the immune response, inflammation or mastitis. The Decision tree models efficiently discovered the best combination of the meta-genes as bio-signature and confirmed that some of the top-ranked genes -ZC3H12A, CXCL2, GRO, CFB- as biomarkers for E. coli mastitis (with the accuracy 83% in average). This research properly indicated that by combination of two novel data mining tools, meta-analysis and machine learning, increased power to detect most informative genes that can help to improve the diagnosis and treatment strategies for E. coli associated with mastitis in cattle.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. All processes including selection of studies, pre-processing of datasets (quality control, normalization, summarization and preparation of datasets), individual differential analysis and performing a meta-analysis to achieve differentially expressed genes (meta-genes).
Fig 2
Fig 2
The architecture of different Decision tree models in predicting mastitis and healthy samples, based on the differentially expressed genes introduced by meta-analysis (A) Random Forest model with Gini Index criterion run on SVM dataset. (B) Random Forest model with accuracy criterion run on Gini Index dataset (C) Random Forest with Information Gain criterion run on Relief dataset and (D) Random Forest model with Gain Ratio criterion run on SVM dataset.

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The authors received no specific funding for this work.
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