scholarly journals CellRank for directed single-cell fate mapping

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Lange ◽  
Volker Bergen ◽  
Michal Klein ◽  
Manu Setty ◽  
Bernhard Reuter ◽  
...  

AbstractComputational trajectory inference enables the reconstruction of cell-state dynamics from single-cell RNA sequencing experiments. However, trajectory inference requires that the direction of a biological process is known, largely limiting its application to differentiating systems in normal development. Here, we present CellRank (https://cellrank.org) for mapping the fate of single cells in diverse scenarios, including perturbations such as regeneration or disease, for which direction is unknown. Our approach combines the robustness of trajectory inference with directional information from RNA velocity, derived from ratios of spliced to unspliced reads. CellRank takes into account both the gradual and stochastic nature of cellular fate decisions, as well as uncertainty in RNA velocity vectors. On data from pancreas development, we show that it automatically detects initial, intermediate and terminal populations, predicts fate potentials and visualizes continuous gene expression trends along individual lineages. CellRank also predicts a novel dedifferentiation trajectory during regeneration after lung injury, which we follow up experimentally by confirming the existence of previously unknown intermediate cell states.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Theis ◽  
Marius Lange ◽  
Volker Bergen ◽  
Michal Klein ◽  
Manu Setty ◽  
...  

Abstract Computational trajectory inference enables the reconstruction of cell-state dynamics from single-cell RNA sequencing experiments. However, trajectory inference requires that the direction of a biological process is known, largely limiting its application to differentiating systems in normal development. Here, we present CellRank (https://cellrank.org) for mapping the fate of single cells in diverse scenarios, including perturbations such as regeneration or disease, for which direction is unknown. Our approach combines the robustness of trajectory inference with directional information from RNA velocity, derived from ratios of spliced to unspliced reads. CellRank takes into account both the gradual and stochastic nature of cellular fate decisions, as well as uncertainty in RNA velocity vectors. On data from pancreas development, we show that it automatically detects initial, intermediate and terminal populations, predicts fate potentials and visualizes continuous gene expression trends along individual lineages. CellRank also predicts a novel dedifferentiation trajectory during regeneration after lung injury, which we follow up experimentally by confirming the existence of previously unknown intermediate cell states.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Lange ◽  
Volker Bergen ◽  
Michal Klein ◽  
Manu Setty ◽  
Bernhard Reuter ◽  
...  

AbstractComputational trajectory inference enables the reconstruction of cell state dynamics from single-cell RNA sequencing experiments. However, trajectory inference requires that the direction of a biological process is known, largely limiting its application to differentiating systems in normal development. Here, we present CellRank (https://cellrank.org) for single-cell fate mapping in diverse scenarios, including regeneration, reprogramming and disease, for which direction is unknown. Our approach combines the robustness of trajectory inference with directional information from RNA velocity, taking into account the gradual and stochastic nature of cellular fate decisions, as well as uncertainty in velocity vectors. On pancreas development data, CellRank automatically detects initial, intermediate and terminal populations, predicts fate potentials and visualizes continuous gene expression trends along individual lineages. Applied to lineage-traced cellular reprogramming data, predicted fate probabilities correctly recover reprogramming outcomes. CellRank also predicts a new dedifferentiation trajectory during postinjury lung regeneration, including previously unknown intermediate cell states, which we confirm experimentally.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Zhao ◽  
Shouguo Gao ◽  
Sachiko Kajigaya ◽  
Qingguo Liu ◽  
Zhijie Wu ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective Single cell methodology enables detection and quantification of transcriptional changes and unravelling dynamic aspects of the transcriptional heterogeneity not accessible using bulk sequencing approaches. We have applied single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) to fresh human bone marrow CD34+ cells and profiled 391 single hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) from healthy donors to characterize lineage- and stage-specific transcription during hematopoiesis. Results Cells clustered into six distinct groups, which could be assigned to known HSPC subpopulations based on lineage specific genes. Reconstruction of differentiation trajectories in single cells revealed four committed lineages derived from HSCs, as well as dynamic expression changes underlying cell fate during early erythroid-megakaryocytic, lymphoid, and granulocyte-monocyte differentiation. A similar non-hierarchical pattern of hematopoiesis could be derived from analysis of published single-cell assay for transposase-accessible chromatin sequencing (scATAC-seq), consistent with a sequential relationship between chromatin dynamics and regulation of gene expression during lineage commitment (first, altered chromatin conformation, then mRNA transcription). Computationally, we have reconstructed molecular trajectories connecting HSCs directly to four hematopoietic lineages. Integration of long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) expression from the same cells demonstrated mRNA transcriptome, lncRNA, and the epigenome were highly homologous in their pattern of gene activation and suppression during hematopoietic cell differentiation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunny Z. Wu ◽  
Daniel L. Roden ◽  
Ghamdan Al-Eryani ◽  
Nenad Bartonicek ◽  
Kate Harvey ◽  
...  

Abstract Background High throughput single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring cellular heterogeneity among complex human cancers. scRNA-Seq studies using fresh human surgical tissue are logistically difficult, preclude histopathological triage of samples, and limit the ability to perform batch processing. This hindrance can often introduce technical biases when integrating patient datasets and increase experimental costs. Although tissue preservation methods have been previously explored to address such issues, it is yet to be examined on complex human tissues, such as solid cancers and on high throughput scRNA-Seq platforms. Methods Using the Chromium 10X platform, we sequenced a total of ~ 120,000 cells from fresh and cryopreserved replicates across three primary breast cancers, two primary prostate cancers and a cutaneous melanoma. We performed detailed analyses between cells from each condition to assess the effects of cryopreservation on cellular heterogeneity, cell quality, clustering and the identification of gene ontologies. In addition, we performed single-cell immunophenotyping using CITE-Seq on a single breast cancer sample cryopreserved as solid tissue fragments. Results Tumour heterogeneity identified from fresh tissues was largely conserved in cryopreserved replicates. We show that sequencing of single cells prepared from cryopreserved tissue fragments or from cryopreserved cell suspensions is comparable to sequenced cells prepared from fresh tissue, with cryopreserved cell suspensions displaying higher correlations with fresh tissue in gene expression. We showed that cryopreservation had minimal impacts on the results of downstream analyses such as biological pathway enrichment. For some tumours, cryopreservation modestly increased cell stress signatures compared to freshly analysed tissue. Further, we demonstrate the advantage of cryopreserving whole-cells for detecting cell-surface proteins using CITE-Seq, which is impossible using other preservation methods such as single nuclei-sequencing. Conclusions We show that the viable cryopreservation of human cancers provides high-quality single-cells for multi-omics analysis. Our study guides new experimental designs for tissue biobanking for future clinical single-cell RNA sequencing studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy A. Lombardo ◽  
Marzieh Aliaghaei ◽  
Quy H. Nguyen ◽  
Kai Kessenbrock ◽  
Jered B. Haun

AbstractTissues are complex mixtures of different cell subtypes, and this diversity is increasingly characterized using high-throughput single cell analysis methods. However, these efforts are hindered, as tissues must first be dissociated into single cell suspensions using methods that are often inefficient, labor-intensive, highly variable, and potentially biased towards certain cell subtypes. Here, we present a microfluidic platform consisting of three tissue processing technologies that combine tissue digestion, disaggregation, and filtration. The platform is evaluated using a diverse array of tissues. For kidney and mammary tumor, microfluidic processing produces 2.5-fold more single cells. Single cell RNA sequencing further reveals that endothelial cells, fibroblasts, and basal epithelium are enriched without affecting stress response. For liver and heart, processing time is dramatically reduced. We also demonstrate that recovery of cells from the system at periodic intervals during processing increases hepatocyte and cardiomyocyte numbers, as well as increases reproducibility from batch-to-batch for all tissues.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Wang ◽  
Andrew E. Teschendorff

AbstractInferring the activity of transcription factors in single cells is a key task to improve our understanding of development and complex genetic diseases. This task is, however, challenging due to the relatively large dropout rate and noisy nature of single-cell RNA-Seq data. Here we present a novel statistical inference framework called SCIRA (Single Cell Inference of Regulatory Activity), which leverages the power of large-scale bulk RNA-Seq datasets to infer high-quality tissue-specific regulatory networks, from which regulatory activity estimates in single cells can be subsequently obtained. We show that SCIRA can correctly infer regulatory activity of transcription factors affected by high technical dropouts. In particular, SCIRA can improve sensitivity by as much as 70% compared to differential expression analysis and current state-of-the-art methods. Importantly, SCIRA can reveal novel regulators of cell-fate in tissue-development, even for cell-types that only make up 5% of the tissue, and can identify key novel tumor suppressor genes in cancer at single cell resolution. In summary, SCIRA will be an invaluable tool for single-cell studies aiming to accurately map activity patterns of key transcription factors during development, and how these are altered in disease.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imad Abugessaisa ◽  
Shuhei Noguchi ◽  
Melissa Cardon ◽  
Akira Hasegawa ◽  
Kazuhide Watanabe ◽  
...  

AbstractAnalysis and interpretation of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) experiments are compromised by the presence of poor quality cells. For meaningful analyses, such poor quality cells should be excluded to avoid biases and large variation. However, no clear guidelines exist. We introduce SkewC, a novel quality-assessment method to identify poor quality single-cells in scRNA-seq experiments. The method is based on the assessment of gene coverage for each single cell and its skewness as a quality measure. To validate the method, we investigated the impact of poor quality cells on downstream analyses and compared biological differences between typical and poor quality cells. Moreover, we measured the ratio of intergenic expression, suggesting genomic contamination, and foreign organism contamination of single-cell samples. SkewC is tested in 37,993 single-cells generated by 15 scRNA-seq protocols. We envision SkewC as an indispensable QC method to be incorporated into scRNA-seq experiment to preclude the possibility of scRNA-seq data misinterpretation.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah R. Dueck ◽  
Rizi Ai ◽  
Adrian Camarena ◽  
Bo Ding ◽  
Reymundo Dominguez ◽  
...  

AbstractRecently, measurement of RNA at single cell resolution has yielded surprising insights. Methods for single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have received considerable attention, but the broad reliability of single cell methods and the factors governing their performance are still poorly known. Here, we conducted a large-scale control experiment to assess the transfer function of three scRNA-seq methods and factors modulating the function. All three methods detected greater than 70% of the expected number of genes and had a 50% probability of detecting genes with abundance greater than 2 to 4 molecules. Despite the small number of molecules, sequencing depth significantly affected gene detection. While biases in detection and quantification were qualitatively similar across methods, the degree of bias differed, consistent with differences in molecular protocol. Measurement reliability increased with expression level for all methods and we conservatively estimate the measurement transfer functions to be linear above ~5-10 molecules. Based on these extensive control studies, we propose that RNA-seq of single cells has come of age, yielding quantitative biological information.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gioele La Manno ◽  
Ruslan Soldatov ◽  
Hannah Hochgerner ◽  
Amit Zeisel ◽  
Viktor Petukhov ◽  
...  

AbstractRNA abundance is a powerful indicator of the state of individual cells, but does not directly reveal dynamic processes such as cellular differentiation. Here we show that RNA velocity—the time derivative of RNA abundance—can be estimated by distinguishing unspliced and spliced mRNAs in standard single-cell RNA sequencing protocols. We show that RNA velocity is a vector that predicts the future state of individual cells on a timescale of hours. We validate the accuracy of RNA velocity in the neural crest lineage, demonstrate its use on multiple technical platforms, reconstruct the branching lineage tree of the mouse hippocampus, and measure RNA kinetics in human embryonic brain. We expect RNA velocity to greatly aid the analysis of developmental lineages and cellular dynamics, particularly in humans.


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