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tKOI

Transcriptomic Knowledge-Graph Omics Integration for Human Pathway Analysis

The tkoi package provides an integrative framework that combines transcriptomic data with a human-specific biological knowledge graph. This enables network-aware enrichment, functional interpretation, and gene prioritization via personalized PageRank and ontology-aware annotation.

Web Application

For non-power users, please use the web application of tKOI at tkoi.org.

Contextualization Agent

For subsequent analysis upon getting network enrichment statistics, please use tKOIAgent for contextualization and network treversal.

Documentations

Please refer to Documentation for detailed documentation of this R package.

Installation

To install the development version from GitHub:

# Install devtools if necessary
install.packages("devtools")

# Install tkoi
devtools::install_github("Broccolito/tkoi")

Core Features

  • Personalized PageRank propagation using transcriptomic weights
  • Permutation-based enrichment scoring for network nodes
  • Functional annotation using Gene Ontology, Disease Ontology, Cell Ontology, Reactome, and more
  • Modular and extensible S4 object design (tKOIList)
  • Export and visualization tools for enriched subnetworks
  • Seamless compatibility with clusterProfiler, enrichplot, and ggplot2 ## Getting Started

Example Workflow

This section walks you through a complete example using the tkoi package—from reading expression data, running the core network analysis, to visualizing enrichment results.

Step 1: Load Example Gene Expression Data

The tkoi package includes a small example CSV file containing simulated gene expression results. We’ll read it using data.table for performance.

library(tkoi)
library(data.table)

# Get the file path of the example expression data
file_path = system.file("extdata", "example_data.csv", package = "tkoi")

# Read the CSV file
expression_data = fread(file_path)
head(expression_data)

The file includes columns:

  • gene_name: Ensembl gene identifiers
  • logfc: log2 fold-change values
  • pvalue: associated p-values for differential expression

Step 2: Run tKOI Network Enrichment Analysis

tKOI integrates transcriptomic changes with a biological knowledge graph using a personalized PageRank algorithm. It also performs permutations to assess statistical enrichment.

tkoi_result = run_tkoi(
  expression_data = expression_data,
  subnetwork = tkoi::tkoi_net,    # Predefined igraph network included with the package
  pvalue_threshold = 0.05,        # p-value filter for differential expression
  logfc_threshold = 0.25,         # Minimum log fold change
  indirect_link_threshold = 3,    # Required indirect connectivity for downstream inclusion
  topology_similarity = 0.9,      # Similarity for selecting matched genes in permutations
  n_permutation = 100,            # Number of random permutations
  damping_factor = 0.85,          # PageRank damping factor
  maximum_iteration = 500         # Max iterations for convergence
)

The result is an S4 object (tKOIList) that stores PageRank scores, permutation statistics, and network annotations.

Step 3: Perform Gene Ontology (GO) Enrichment

You can extend the analysis by integrating GO term enrichment using clusterProfiler. This allows for side-by-side comparisons of ontology-based and graph-based enrichment.

tkoi_result = run_gene_enrichment(tkoi_result)

This adds a gene_enrichment_comparison slot containing GO enrichment tables and visual summaries.

Step 4: Visualize GO vs Graph Enrichment

Two visualizations are automatically generated:

Scatter Plot (All Terms) 

tkoi_result@gene_enrichment_comparison$comparison_scatter1

Scatter Plot (Faceted by GO Namespace) 

tkoi_result@gene_enrichment_comparison$comparison_scatter2

These plots compare tKOI network enrichment (beta) with gene ontology q-values.

Step 5: Visualize Differential Genes in the Network

The make_gene_exploration_plot() function highlights upregulated and downregulated genes in a scatter plot based on both experimental and network evidence.

plt1 = make_gene_exploration_plot(
  tkoi_list = tkoi_result,
  sig_color = "#F39B7FB2",
  non_sig_color = "gray"
)
plt1

Step 6: Export Gene-Level Prioritization Table

This returns a data frame containing logFC, p-values, PageRank scores, and FDRs for each gene.

gene_data = export_gene_exploration_data(tkoi_result)
head(gene_data)

Step 7: Visualize Top N Enriched Nodes

Use visualize_topn() to highlight the most significantly enriched genes, pathways, or biological concepts based on network-level statistics.

plt2 = visualize_topn(
  tkoi_list = tkoi_result,
  category = "Gene",       # Can also be "Pathway", "BiologicalProcess", etc.
  top_n = 25,
  high_color = "#FF5733",  # Strong enrichment
  low_color = "#154360"    # Moderate enrichment
)
plt2

Step 8: (Optional) Save the Analysis Result

Save your full analysis object for future use:

save(tkoi_result, file = "tkoi_result.rda")

S4 Object Structure

tKOIList is an S4 object returned by run_tkoi() with the following slots:

  • expression_data: Input transcriptomic measurements
  • pagerank_data: Personalized PageRank vectors
  • network_summary_statistics: Node-level enrichment results
  • gene_enrichment_comparison: GO enrichment overlay and plots

Annotation Resources

Built-in annotation tables support functional interpretation of the knowledge graph:

  • go_annotation, disease_annotation, celltype_annotation, anatomy_annotation
  • compound_annotation, protein_annotation, complex_annotation
  • reaction_annotation, pathway_annotation, pwgroup_annotation, etc.

Inspect them like so:

data(go_annotation)
head(go_annotation)

License

MIT + file LICENSE

Citation

Gu, W., Bellucci, G., Peetoom, B., McDonagh, M., & Baranzini, S. (in preparation). Integrating Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs to Enhance Transcriptomics Analysis.

Contact

Wanjun Gu ORCID: 0000-0002-7342-7000