About

The Molecular Degree of Perturbation webtool quantifies the heterogeneity of samples within a group using transcriptome data. It takes data containing at least two classes (control and test) and assigns a score to all samples based on how perturbed they are compared to the controls. Perturbation can be an infection, drug treatment, siRNA silencing, vaccination, and any type of disease. The MDP analysis is useful for gene expression data, as well as proteomic and metabolomic data, that have control and test samples in the same dataset. The more control and test samples that you have (ideally at least 10), the more accurate the calculation sample scores.



The MDP works as follows:

Step 1: The median and standard deviation of the genes from the control samples are calculated.



Step 2: The median and standard deviation values are used to perform a Z-score normalization of all genes.



Step 3: The absolute value of these expression values are taken, and values less than 2 are set to 0. The values that remain represent significant deviations from the healthy samples.



Step 4: The scores for each sample are calculated by finding the average of the normalized gene values for each sample, using either a) all genes, b) perturbed genes and c) optionally supplied gene sets.

What files do I need to provide?

You need to provide expression data, a file containing the phenotypic information, and an optional .gmt file if you want run the MDP on different gene sets. See the tutorial for more information.

Additional details

The design of the algorithm is based on the Molecular Distance to Health which was first described by Pankla et al. 2009. The MDP, by comparison, does not discretize the Z-score normalised gene scores. We also allow you to use the mean to calculate the average gene expression, so that the gene average is less sensitive to outliers. You can also select the standard deviation threshold.

The MDP utilizes the ggplot2 R package - https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggplot2