Question

Time points and donors - errors with contrasts

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sasha • 0

@sasha-11847

Last seen 7.5 years ago

Dear community,

I've been trying to test if there are differentially expressed genes between different time-points of samples taken from the same donors.

Experiment:

SampleID Donor TimePoint

A1 1 T1

A2 1 T2

A3 1 T3

A4 2 T1

A5 2 T2

A6 2 T3

And so it goes until sampleID A12, so in total I have 4 different Donors and for each I have 3 timepoints.

I used a design that takes into account Donor (given that the samples from the same donor are not independent) and TimePoint: ~ Donor + TimePoint. I then used test="LRT" when calling DESeq function with a reduced design: ~Donor to find genes which are different at any time-point. After that I tried to test individual effects by specifying a contrast in the results function:

Res <- results(DDS, contrast=c("TimePoint","T1","T2"))

But it give me an error:

Error in cleanContrast(object, contrast, expanded = isExpanded, listValues = listValues,  : 
  as T2 is the reference level, was expecting TimePoint_T1_vs_T2 to be present in 'resultsNames(object)'

I also tried:

Res <- results(DDS, contrast=c("TimePoint","T1","T2"), test="Wald")

And it gave me the same error. What am I doing wrong? Should I do this differently?

From just running results without contrast: Res <- results(DDS) I get no errors and the results look as follows:

log2 fold change (MLE): TimePoint2 
LRT p-value: '~ Mother_Child + TimePoint' vs '~ Mother_Child' 
DataFrame with 460 rows and 6 columns
          baseMean log2FoldChange     lfcSE      stat      pvalue      padj
         <numeric>      <numeric> <numeric> <numeric>   <numeric> <numeric>
Otu402    2.279747      0.3111686 0.8422597 0.1381527   0.9332554      0.043
Otu131   22.551497      2.0865825 0.8764297 3.3208392   0.1900592      0.032

Why does it say "TimePoint2"? I thought it was the result of comparing T1 vs T2, because is using as reference TimePoint T1, but when I try relevel to set T2 as reference, the results are exactly the same :(

Please, any help would be greatly appreciated :)

Cheers

Sasha

deseq2 contrast • 1.9k views

ADD COMMENT • link updated 7.1 years ago by Michael Love 43k • written 7.5 years ago by sasha • 0

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Dear Michael,

Thank you for your reply. I checked the character string as you suggested:

> levels(DDS$TimePoint)
[1] "T2" "T1" "T3"

> resultsNames(DDS)
[1] "Intercept"     "Mother_Child1" "Mother_Child2" "Mother_Child3" "TimePoint1"      "TimePoint2"

Just to let you know, Mother_Child = Donor in my case (forgot to state that).

Still don't understand what am I doing wrong. Maybe there's something else I could try changing?

Thanks in advance

Sasha

ADD REPLY • link updated 7.4 years ago by Michael Love 43k • written 7.4 years ago by sasha • 0

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Can you show all the code from scratch? It should just give the levels of the variable in resultsNames(), unless you change them after running DESeq()

ADD REPLY • link 7.4 years ago Michael Love 43k

score 0 · Answer 1 · 2017-07-12

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Entering edit mode

Michael Love 43k

@mikelove

Last seen 2 days ago

United States

You have to be careful that you specify exactly the right character strings you used for the factor levels.

You could check

resultsNames(dds)

or also

levels(dds$TimePoint)

To see what those are

ADD COMMENT • link 7.5 years ago Michael Love 43k

score 0 · Answer 2 · 2017-07-20

Hi Michael,

I realised just recently that the problem is related to the "SAN controllers" from the unix system (where I use R studio from) in my institute. They are actually having big problems at the moment. When I repeated everything in my R studio (in my personal computer) everything worked perfectly.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the inconvenience,

Alexandra