Joint and Unique Multiblock Analysis of biological data – multiomics malaria study

Modern profiling technologies enable obtaining large amounts of data which can be later used for comprehensive understanding of the studied system. Proper evaluation of such data is challenging, and cannot be faced by bare analysis of separate datasets. Integrated approaches are necessary, because only data integration allows finding correlation trends common for all studied data sets and revealing hidden structures not known a priori. This improves understanding and interpretation of the complex systems. Joint and Unique MultiBlock Analysis (JUMBA) is an analysis method based on the OnPLS-algorithm that decomposes a set of matrices into joint parts containing variation shared with other connected matrices and variation that is unique for each single matrix. Mapping unique variation is important from a data integration perspective, since it certainly cannot be expected that all variation co-varies. In this work we used JUMBA for integrated analysis of lipidomic, metabolomic and oxylipin datasets obtained from profiling of plasma samples from children infected with P. falciparum malaria. P. falciparum is one of the primary contributors to childhood mortality and obstetric complications in the developing world, what makes development of the new diagnostic and prognostic tools, as well as better understanding of the disease, of utmost importance. In presented work JUMBA made it possible to detect already known trends related to disease progression, but also to discover new structures in the data connected to food intake and personal differences in metabolism. By separating the variation in each data set into joint and unique, JUMBA reduced complexity of the analysis, facilitated detection of samples and variables corresponding to specific structures across multiple datasets and by doing this enabled fast interpretation of the studied system. All this makes JUMBA a perfect choice for multiblock analysis of systems biology data.