Expression modules in S. pneumoniae

I recently read a pre-print from the Veening lab where they had reconstructed various (22 total) physiological conditions in vitro and then measured expression levels with RNA-seq. I thought it was a great bit of research, and would encourage you to read it here if you’re interested: https://doi.org/10.1101/283739

They’ve also done a really good job with data availability, having released a browser for their data (PneumoExpress), and they have put their raw data on zenodo.

I was interested in trying to replicate their expression module analysis, which was performed using WGCNA. I first downloaded the co-expression matrix, which is split across five CSV files in the zenodo archive. I then basically ran WGCNA exactly as suggested in their tutorial. I then used the annotations from the lab’s D39V genome to get final expression modules.

The expression modules look sensible to me, with the comE master regulator splitting the expression of the competence pathway and associated genes as expected. The modules I predicted can be found here.

Thanks to the authors for making their data so accessible! If you find this useful I would also note the authors also analysed their data with WGCNA, probably in a more optimal and error-checked way than I have, so most likely they have better clusters.

Here is a gist of the code I used: