consexpressionR: an R package for consensus differential gene expression analysis

Abstract: Motivation: Bulk RNA-Seq is a widely used method for studying gene expression across a variety of contexts. The significance of RNA-Seq studies has grown with the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies. Computational methods have been developed for each stage of the identification of differentially expressed genes. Nevertheless, there are few studies exploring the association between different types of methods. In this study, we evaluated the impact of the association of methodologies in the results of differential expression analysis. By adopting two data sets with qPCR data (to gold-standard reference), seven methods were implemented and assessed in R packages (EBSeq, edgeR, DESeq2, limma, SAMseq, NOISeq, and Knowseq), which was performed and assessed separately and in association. The results were evaluated considering the adopted qPCR data. Results: Here, we introduce consexpressionR, an R package that automates differential expression analysis using consensus of at least seven methodologies, producing more assertive results with a significant reduction in false positives. Availability: consexpressionR is an R package available via source code and support are available at GitHub (https://github.com/costasilvati/consexpressionR).