contamDE: differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data for contaminated tumor samples

摘要

Motivation: Accurate detection of differentially expressed genes between tumor and normal samples is a primary approach of cancer-related biomarker identification. Due to the infiltration of tumor surrounding normal cells, the expression data derived from tumor samples would always be contaminated with normal cells. Ignoring such cellular contamination would deflate the power of detecting DE genes and further confound the biological interpretation of the analysis results. For the time being, there does not exists any differential expression analysis approach for RNA-seq data in literature that can properly account for the contamination of tumor samples.