A curated benchmark of enhancer-gene interactions for evaluating enhancer-target gene prediction methods
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Abstract
Background: Many genome-wide collections of candidate cis-regulatory elements (cCREs) have been defined using genomic and epigenomic data, but it remains a major challenge to connect these elements to their target genes. Results: To facilitate the development of computational methods for predicting target genes, we develop a Benchmark of candidate Enhancer-Gene Interactions (BENGI) by integrating the recently developed Registry of cCREs with experimentally derived genomic interactions. We use BENGI to test several published computational methods for linking enhancers with genes, including signal correlation and the TargetFinder and PEP supervised learning methods. We find that while TargetFinder is the best-performing method, it is only modestly better than a baseline distance method for most benchmark datasets when trained and tested with the same cell type and that TargetFinder often does not outperform the distance method when applied across cell types. Conclusions: Our results suggest that current computational methods need to be improved and that BENGI presents a useful framework for method development and testing.
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STAT3 activation potentiates IL-6 signaling by increasing receptor and ligand levels.
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From Dynamic IL-6R/STAT3 signaling leads to heterogeneity of metabolic phenotype in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cells (2024) · cites this paper as [36]
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- Authors
- Moore, J. E., Pratt, H. E., Purcaro, M. J., & Weng, Z.
- Affiliations
- University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (US)
- Corresponding author
- Weng, Zhiping
- Venue
- Genome Biology
- Published
- 2020-01-22
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 17-17
- ISSN
- 1465-6906 (ISSN-L)
- 1474-760X
- PMC
- PMC6977301
- OpenAlex
- W3002247544
- Cited by
- 106
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 9 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 6.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Genome biology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Human Genome Research Institute (1U24HG009446-01, 5U41HG007000)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genetic Associations and Epidemiology
- Keywords
- enhancer-gene interactions, cis-regulatory elements, benchmark dataset, PEP, signal correlation, cell type specificity, epigenomic data
- MeSH terms
- Machine Learning, Enhancer Elements, Genetic, Gene Expression Regulation, Benchmarking, Genomics, Data Curation
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