Most (90%) DE genes of a contrast were upregulated: implication on the assumptions of TMM-normalisation?
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@mikhaelmanurung-17423
Last seen 21 months ago
Netherlands

Dear all,

If I understand correctly, TMM-normalisation has two assumptions: 1. Most genes are not DE 2. Comparable number of DE genes that are up/down-regulated (i.e. symmetry)

According to my analysis (I am using limma-voom workflow), one of my contrasts yield 200 DEGs, 90% of which were upregulated. Does it mean that the assumptions break?

My second question: is it a good practice to review the previous steps in DE analysis after taking a look at the results?

Best regards, Mikhael

limma edger normalization • 800 views
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@gordon-smyth
Last seen 10 hours ago
WEHI, Melbourne, Australia

No, TMM does not make any assumption that there are equal numbers of up and down genes

The edgeR User's Guide says:

TMM is recommended for most RNA-Seq data where the majority (more than half) of the genes are believed not differentially expressed between any pair of the samples.

It doesn't say anything about symmetry.

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Thank you for the clarification. I got that understanding after reading this paper, particularly the "Normalization by distribution/testing" part.

Best regards, Mikhael

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Most normalization methods will have some trouble, not be perfect, when there is a lot of asymmetric DE. But when I say "a lot", I mean as a percentage of the total number of genes, not as a proportion of the DE genes. Your experiment has very little asymmetry. If you have 180 up genes and 20 down genes, then the asymmetry is about 160 genes, which is a tiny percentage of the 10,000 - 20,000 genes that you are probably analysing. This small degree of asymmetry will not cause problems for any normalization method, much less for a very robust method like TMM. The paper you cite agrees that TMM is one of the best choices.

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