scholarly journals BayesSpace enables the robust characterization of spatial gene expression architecture in tissue sections at increased resolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Zhao ◽  
Matthew R. Stone ◽  
Xing Ren ◽  
Thomas Pulliam ◽  
Paul Nghiem ◽  
...  

AbstractRecently developed spatial gene expression technologies such as the Spatial Transcriptomics and Visium platforms allow for comprehensive measurement of transcriptomic profiles while retaining spatial context. However, existing methods for analyzing spatial gene expression data often do not efficiently leverage the spatial information and fail to address the limited resolution of the technology. Here, we introduce BayesSpace, a fully Bayesian statistical method for clustering analysis and resolution enhancement of spatial transcriptomics data that seamlessly integrates into current transcriptomics analysis workflows. We show that BayesSpace improves the identification of transcriptionally distinct tissues from spatial transcriptomics samples of the brain, of melanoma, and of squamous cell carcinoma. In particular, BayesSpace’s improved resolution allows the identification of tissue structure that is not detectable at the original resolution and thus not recovered by other methods. Using an in silico dataset constructed from scRNA-seq, we demonstrate that BayesSpace can spatially resolve expression patterns to near single-cell resolution without the need for external single-cell sequencing data. In all, our results illustrate the utility BayesSpace has in facilitating the discovery of biological insights from a variety of spatial transcriptomics datasets.

Author(s):  
Rebecca Elyanow ◽  
Ron Zeira ◽  
Max Land ◽  
Benjamin J. Raphael

AbstractTumors are highly heterogeneous, consisting of cell populations with both transcriptional and genetic diversity. These diverse cell populations are spatially organized within a tumor, creating a distinct tumor microenvironment. A new technology called spatial transcriptomics can measure spatial patterns of gene expression within a tissue by sequencing RNA transcripts from a grid of spots, each containing a small number of cells. In tumor cells, these gene expression patterns represent the combined contribution of regulatory mechanisms, which alter the rate at which a gene is transcribed, and genetic diversity, particularly copy number aberrations (CNAs) which alter the number of copies of a gene in the genome. CNAs are common in tumors and often promote cancer growth through upregulation of oncogenes or downregulation of tumor-suppressor genes. We introduce a new method STARCH (Spatial Transcriptomics Algorithm Reconstructing Copy-number Heterogeneity) to infer CNAs from spatial transcriptomics data. STARCH overcomes challenges in inferring CNAs from RNA-sequencing data by leveraging the observation that cells located nearby in a tumor are likely to share similar CNAs. We find that STARCH outperforms existing methods for inferring CNAs from RNA-sequencing data without incorporating spatial information.


Author(s):  
VG LeBlanc ◽  
D Trinh ◽  
M Hughes ◽  
I Luthra ◽  
D Livingstone ◽  
...  

Glioblastomas (GBMs) account for nearly half of all primary malignant brain tumours, and current therapies are often only marginally effective. Our understanding of the underlying biology of these tumours and the development of new therapies have been complicated in part by widespread inter- and intratumoural heterogeneity. To characterize this heterogeneity, we performed regional subsampling of primary glioblastomas and derived organoids from these tissue samples. We then performed single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) on these primary regional subsamples and 1-3 matched organoids per sample. We have profiled samples from six tumour sets to date and have obtained sequencing data for 21,234 primary tissue cells and 14,742 organoid cells. While the most apparent differences in gene expression appear to be between individual tumours, we were also able to identify similar cellular subpopulations across tissue samples and across organoids. Importantly, organoids derived from the same tissue sample appeared to be composed of similar cellular subpopulations and were highly comparable to each other, indicating that replicate organoids faithfully represent the original tumour tissue. Overall, our scRNA-seq approach will help evaluate the utility of tumour-derived organoids as model systems for GBM and will aid in identifying cellular subpopulations defined by gene expression patterns, both in primary GBM regional subsamples and their associated organoids. These analyses will allow for the characterization of clonal or subclonal populations that are likely to respond to different therapeutic approaches and may also uncover novel therapeutic targets previously unrevealed through bulk analyses.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaohao Gu ◽  
Zhandong Liu

Abstract Spatial gene-expression is a crucial determinant of cell fate and behavior. Recent imaging and sequencing-technology advancements have enabled scientists to develop new tools that use spatial information to measure gene-expression at close to single-cell levels. Yet, while Fluorescence In-situ Hybridization (FISH) can quantify transcript numbers at single-cell resolution, it is limited to a small number of genes. Similarly, slide-seq was designed to measure spatial-expression profiles at the single-cell level but has a relatively low gene-capture rate. And although single-cell RNA-seq enables deep cellular gene-expression profiling, it loses spatial information during sample-collection. These major limitations have stymied these methods’ broader application in the field. To overcome spatio-omics technology’s limitations and better understand spatial patterns at single-cell resolution, we designed a computation algorithm that uses glmSMA to predict cell locations by integrating scRNA-seq data with a spatial-omics reference atlas. We treated cell-mapping as a convex optimization problem by minimizing the differences between cellular-expression profiles and location-expression profiles with an L1 regularization and graph Laplacian based L2 regularization to ensure a sparse and smooth mapping. We validated the mapping results by reconstructing spatial- expression patterns of well-known marker genes in complex tissues, like the mouse cerebellum and hippocampus. We used the biological literature to verify that the reconstructed patterns can recapitulate cell-type and anatomy structures. Our work thus far shows that, together, we can use glmSMA to accurately assign single cells to their original reference-atlas locations.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Neumann ◽  
Xiaocai Xu ◽  
Cezary Smaczniak ◽  
Julia Schumacher ◽  
Wenhao Yan ◽  
...  

Identity and functions of plant cells are influenced by their precise cellular location within the plant body. Cellular heterogeneity in growth and differentiation trajectories results in organ patterning. Therefore, assessing this heterogeneity at molecular scale is a major question in developmental biology. Single-cell transcriptomics (scRNA-seq) allows to characterize and quantify gene expression heterogeneity in developing organs at unprecedented resolution. However, the original physical location of the cell is lost during the scRNA-seq procedure. To recover the original location of cells is essential to link gene activity with cellular function and morphology. Here, we reconstruct genome-wide gene expression patterns of individual cells in a floral meristem by combining single-nuclei RNA-seq with 3D spatial reconstruction. By this, gene expression differences among meristematic domains giving rise to different tissue and organ types can be determined. As a proof of principle, the data are used to trace the initiation of vascular identity within the floral meristem. Our work demonstrates the power of spatially reconstructed single cell transcriptome atlases to understand plant morphogenesis. The floral meristem 3D gene expression atlas can be accessed at http://threed-flower-meristem.herokuapp.com


Author(s):  
Hyundoo Jeong ◽  
Zhandong Liu

AbstractSingle-cell RNA sequencing technology provides a novel means to analyze the transcriptomic profiles of individual cells. The technique is vulnerable, however, to a type of noise called dropout effects, which lead to zero-inflated distributions in the transcriptome profile and reduce the reliability of the results. Single-cell RNA sequencing data therefore need to be carefully processed before in-depth analysis. Here we describe a novel imputation method that reduces dropout effects in single-cell sequencing. We construct a cell correspondence network and adjust gene expression estimates based on transcriptome profiles for the local community of cells of the same type. We comprehensively evaluated this method, called PRIME (PRobabilistic IMputation to reduce dropout effects in Expression profiles of single cell sequencing), on six datasets and verified that it improves the quality of visualization and accuracy of clustering analysis and can discover gene expression patterns hidden by noise.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (14) ◽  
pp. 2392-2400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trung Nghia Vu ◽  
Quin F Wills ◽  
Krishna R Kalari ◽  
Nifang Niu ◽  
Liewei Wang ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajeev Vikram ◽  
Wen□Cheng Chou ◽  
Pei-Ei Wu ◽  
Wei-Ting Chen ◽  
Chen-Yang Shen

ABSTRACTBackgroundDiffuse Glioblastoma (GBM) has high mortality and remains one of the most challenging type of cancer to treat. Identifying and characterizing the cells populations driving tumor growth and therapy resistance has been particularly difficult owing to marked inter and intra tumoral heterogeneity observed in these tumors. These tumorigenic populations contain long lived cells associated with latency, immune evasion and metastasis.MethodsHere, we analyzed the single-cell RNA-sequencing data of high grade glioblastomas from four different studies using integrated analysis of gene expression patterns, cell cycle stages and copy number variation to identify gene expression signatures associated with quiescent and cycling neuronal tumorigenic cells.ResultsThe results show that while cycling and quiescent cells are present in GBM of all age groups, they exist in a much larger proportion in pediatric glioblastomas. These cells show similarities in their expression patterns of a number of pluripotency and proliferation related genes. Upon unbiased clustering, these cells explicitly clustered on their cell cycle stage. Quiescent cells in both the groups specifically overexpressed a number of genes for ribosomal protein, while the cycling cells were enriched in the expression of high-mobility group and heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein group genes. A number of well-known markers of quiescence and proliferation in neurogenesis showed preferential expression in the quiescent and cycling populations identified in our analysis. Through our analysis, we identify ribosomal proteins as key constituents of quiescence in glioblastoma stem cells.ConclusionsThis study identifies gene signatures common to adult and pediatric glioblastoma quiescent and cycling stem cell niches. Further research elucidating their role in controlling quiescence and proliferation in tumorigenic cells in high grade glioblastoma will open avenues in more effective treatment strategies for glioblastoma patients.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaohao Gu ◽  
Zhandong Liu

AbstractSpatial gene-expression is a crucial determinant of cell fate and behavior. Recent imaging and sequencing-technology advancements have enabled scientists to develop new tools that use spatial information to measure gene-expression at close to single-cell levels. Yet, while Fluorescence In-situ Hybridization (FISH) can quantify transcript numbers at single-cell resolution, it is limited to a small number of genes. Similarly, slide-seq was designed to measure spatial-expression profiles at the single-cell level but has a relatively low gene-capture rate. And although single-cell RNA-seq enables deep cellular gene-expression profiling, it loses spatial information during sample-collection. These major limitations have stymied these methods’ broader application in the field. To overcome spatio-omics technology’s limitations and better understand spatial patterns at single-cell resolution, we designed a computation algorithm that uses glmSMA to predict cell locations by integrating scRNA-seq data with a spatialomics reference atlas. We treated cell-mapping as a convex optimization problem by minimizing the differences between cellular-expression profiles and location-expression profiles with a L1 regularization and graph Laplacian based L2 regularization to ensure a sparse and smooth mapping. We validated the mapping results by reconstructing spatial-expression patterns of well-known marker genes in complex tissues, like the mouse cerebellum and hippocampus. We used the biological literature to verify that the reconstructed patterns can recapitulate cell-type and anatomy structures. Our work thus far shows that, together, we can use glmSMA to accurately assign single cells to their original reference-atlas locations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (S3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanyuan Li ◽  
Ping Luo ◽  
Yi Lu ◽  
Fang-Xiang Wu

Abstract Background With the development of the technology of single-cell sequence, revealing homogeneity and heterogeneity between cells has become a new area of computational systems biology research. However, the clustering of cell types becomes more complex with the mutual penetration between different types of cells and the instability of gene expression. One way of overcoming this problem is to group similar, related single cells together by the means of various clustering analysis methods. Although some methods such as spectral clustering can do well in the identification of cell types, they only consider the similarities between cells and ignore the influence of dissimilarities on clustering results. This methodology may limit the performance of most of the conventional clustering algorithms for the identification of clusters, it needs to develop special methods for high-dimensional sparse categorical data. Results Inspired by the phenomenon that same type cells have similar gene expression patterns, but different types of cells evoke dissimilar gene expression patterns, we improve the existing spectral clustering method for clustering single-cell data that is based on both similarities and dissimilarities between cells. The method first measures the similarity/dissimilarity among cells, then constructs the incidence matrix by fusing similarity matrix with dissimilarity matrix, and, finally, uses the eigenvalues of the incidence matrix to perform dimensionality reduction and employs the K-means algorithm in the low dimensional space to achieve clustering. The proposed improved spectral clustering method is compared with the conventional spectral clustering method in recognizing cell types on several real single-cell RNA-seq datasets. Conclusions In summary, we show that adding intercellular dissimilarity can effectively improve accuracy and achieve robustness and that improved spectral clustering method outperforms the traditional spectral clustering method in grouping cells.


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