Not by systems alone: replicability assessment of disease expression signals

In characterizing a disease, it is common to search for dysfunctional genes by assaying the transcriptome. The resulting differentially expressed genes are typically assessed for shared features, such as functional annotation or co-expression. While useful, the reliability of these systems methods is hard to evaluate. To better understand shared disease signals, we assess their replicability by first looking at gene-level recurrence and then pathway-level recurrence along with co-expression signals across six pedigrees of a rare homogeneous X-linked disorder, TAF1 syndrome. We find most differentially expressed genes are not recurrent between pedigrees, making functional enrichment largely distinct in each pedigree. However, we find two highly recurrent “functional outliers” (CACNA1I and IGFBP3), genes acting atypically with respect to co-expression and therefore absent from a systems-level assessment. We show this occurs in re-analysis of Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Our results suggest a significant role for genes easily missed in systems approaches.