TailEnrich enables discovery of dysregulated genes through disease sample enrichment testing

TailEnrich identifies subgroup-specific dysregulated genes in Alzheimer’s disease by testing extreme expression tails and scoring disease enrichment with a PE metric.

• Why it matters: In heterogeneous disorders like AD, pathogenic genes may be strongly dysregulated only in subsets, while mean-shift differential expression methods can miss these subgroup effects.
• What they did: TailEnrich independently tests the left (downregulated) and right (upregulated) tails of each gene’s expression distribution for disease sample enrichment, quantified by the PE (Percentage of Enriched disease samples) score.
• The result: In simulated data, it improves accuracy over DESeq2 and edgeR for subset-specific dysregulation, and in AD it finds biologically relevant pathway genes missed by mean shift approaches.

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