Back

DBSOMA: A Machine Learning Method that Identifies Chemical Modulators of Transcriptional States Uncovers Effectors of Beta-Cell Maturation

Kunz, T. R.; Rivera-Feliciano, J.

2026-02-02 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.01.30.701818 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The effects of perturbation on a biological system can be readily measured in terms of transcriptional changes. However, despite a wealth of transcriptional perturbation response data, there are currently few methods to draw equivalence between the many biological systems used to generate that data and a specific system of interest. Here we use density analysis of transcriptional correlations to computationally predict whether a given perturbation readout is relevant to Stem Cell derived islet (SC-Islet) maturation. The approach, Density Based Self-Organizing Map Analysis (DBSOMA), first learns patterns of gene expression represented in scRNA-seq sets by clustering genes with the Self-Organizing-Map (SOM) algorithm. Perturbation expression profiles and other gene lists are then projected onto the SOM grid, where the degree of clustering is determined by the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm. We applied DBSOMA to SC-Islet maturation and identified known and novel regulators of {beta}-cell maturation. This workflow can be applied broadly to biological systems where single-cell RNA-sequencing data is available, and a desired outcome can be represented in transcriptional changes.

Matching journals

The top 12 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.