CancerInSilico: An R/Bioconductor package for combining mathematical and statistical modeling to simulate time course bulk and single cell gene expression data in cancer

PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 Apr 19;14(4):e1006935. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006935. eCollection 2018 Jun.

Abstract

Bioinformatics techniques to analyze time course bulk and single cell omics data are advancing. The absence of a known ground truth of the dynamics of molecular changes challenges benchmarking their performance on real data. Realistic simulated time-course datasets are essential to assess the performance of time course bioinformatics algorithms. We develop an R/Bioconductor package, CancerInSilico, to simulate bulk and single cell transcriptional data from a known ground truth obtained from mathematical models of cellular systems. This package contains a general R infrastructure for running cell-based models and simulating gene expression data based on the model states. We show how to use this package to simulate a gene expression data set and consequently benchmark analysis methods on this data set with a known ground truth. The package is freely available via Bioconductor: http://bioconductor.org/packages/CancerInSilico/.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Gene Expression
  • Humans
  • Neoplasms / pathology*