Abstract
Gene regulation is tightly controlled to ensure a wide variety of cell types and functions. These controls take place at different levels and are associated with different genomic regulatory regions. An actual challenge is to understand how the gene regulation machinery works in each cell type and to identify the most important regulators. Several studies attempt to understand the regulatory mechanisms by modeling gene expression using epigenetic marks. Nonetheless, these approaches rely on experimental data which are limited to some samples, costly and time-consuming. Besides, the important component of gene regulation based at the sequence level cannot be captured by these approaches. The main objective of this thesis is to explain mRNA expression based only on DNA sequences features. In a first work, we use Lasso penalized linear regression to predict gene expression using DNA features such as transcription factor binding site (motifs) and nucleotide compositions. We measured the accuracy of our approach on several data from the TCGA database and find similar performance as that of models fitted with experimental data. In addition, we show that nucleotide compositions of different regulatory regions have a major impact on gene expression. Furthermore, we rank the influence of each regulatory regions and show a strong effect of the gene body, especially introns.In a second part, we try to increase the performances of the model. We first consider adding interactions between nucleotide compositions and applying non-linear transformations on predictive variables. This induces a slight increase in model performances.To go one step further, we then learn deep neuronal networks. We consider two types of neural networks: multilayer perceptrons and convolution networks. Hyperparameters of each network are optimized. The performances of both types of networks appear slightly higher than those of a Lasso penalized linear model. In this thesis, we were able to (i) demonstrate the existence of sequence-level instructions for gene expression and (ii) provide different frameworks based on complementary approaches. Additional work is ongoing, in particular with the last direction based on deep learning, with the aim of detecting additional information present in the sequence.