scholarly journals Length Biases in Single-Cell RNA Sequencing of pre-mRNA

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gennady Gorin ◽  
Lior Pachter

Single-molecule pre-mRNA and mRNA sequencing data can be modeled and analyzed using the Markov chain formalism to yield genome-wide insights into transcription. However, quantitative inference with such data requires careful assessment and understanding of noise sources. We find that long pre-mRNA transcripts are over-represented in sequencing data, and explore the mechanistic implications. A biological explanation for this phenomenon within our modeling framework requires unrealistic transcriptional parameters, leading us to posit a length-based model of capture bias. We provide solutions for this model, and use them to find concordant and mechanistically plausible parameter trends across data from multiple single-cell RNA-seq experiments in several species.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Huan Shi ◽  
Kevin Y. Yip

AbstractK-mer counting has many applications in sequencing data processing and analysis. However, sequencing errors can produce many false k-mers that substantially increase the memory requirement during counting. We propose a fast k-mer counting method, CQF-deNoise, which has a novel component for dynamically identifying and removing false k-mers while preserving counting accuracy. Compared with four state-of-the-art k-mer counting methods, CQF-deNoise consumed 49-76% less memory than the second best method, but still ran competitively fast. The k-mer counts from CQF-deNoise produced cell clusters from single-cell RNA-seq data highly consistent with CellRanger but required only 5% of the running time at the same memory consumption, suggesting that CQF-deNoise can be used for a preview of cell clusters for an early detection of potential data problems, before running a much more time-consuming full analysis pipeline.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Wang ◽  
Gang Ren ◽  
Ni Hong ◽  
Wenfei Jin

Abstract Background: CCCTC-Binding Factor (CTCF), also known as 11-zinc finger protein, participates in many cellular processes, including insulator activity, transcriptional regulation and organization of chromatin architecture. Based on single cell flow cytometry and single cell RNA-FISH analyses, our previous study showed that deletion of CTCF binding site led to a significantly increase of cellular variation of its target gene. However, the effect of CTCF on genome-wide landscape of cell-to-cell variation is unclear. Results: We knocked down CTCF in EL4 cells using shRNA, and conducted single cell RNA-seq on both wild type (WT) cells and CTCF-Knockdown (CTCF-KD) cells using Fluidigm C1 system. Principal component analysis of single cell RNA-seq data showed that WT and CTCF-KD cells concentrated in two different clusters on PC1, indicating gene expression profiles of WT and CTCF-KD cells were systematically different. Interestingly, GO terms including regulation of transcription, DNA binding, Zinc finger and transcription factor binding were significantly enriched in CTCF-KD-specific highly variable genes, indicating tissue-specific genes such as transcription factors were highly sensitive to CTCF level. The dysregulation of transcription factors potentially explain why knockdown of CTCF lead to systematic change of gene expression. In contrast, housekeeping genes such as rRNA processing, DNA repair and tRNA processing were significantly enriched in WT-specific highly variable genes, potentially due to a higher cellular variation of cell activity in WT cells compared to CTCF-KD cells. We further found cellular variation-increased genes were significantly enriched in down-regulated genes, indicating CTCF knockdown simultaneously reduced the expression levels and increased the expression noise of its regulated genes. Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore genome-wide landscape of cellular variation after CTCF knockdown. Our study not only advances our understanding of CTCF function in maintaining gene expression and reducing expression noise, but also provides a framework for examining gene function.


Circulation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (14) ◽  
pp. 1374-1388
Author(s):  
Yanming Li ◽  
Pingping Ren ◽  
Ashley Dawson ◽  
Hernan G. Vasquez ◽  
Waleed Ageedi ◽  
...  

Background: Ascending thoracic aortic aneurysm (ATAA) is caused by the progressive weakening and dilatation of the aortic wall and can lead to aortic dissection, rupture, and other life-threatening complications. To improve our understanding of ATAA pathogenesis, we aimed to comprehensively characterize the cellular composition of the ascending aortic wall and to identify molecular alterations in each cell population of human ATAA tissues. Methods: We performed single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of ascending aortic tissues from 11 study participants, including 8 patients with ATAA (4 women and 4 men) and 3 control subjects (2 women and 1 man). Cells extracted from aortic tissue were analyzed and categorized with single-cell RNA sequencing data to perform cluster identification. ATAA-related changes were then examined by comparing the proportions of each cell type and the gene expression profiles between ATAA and control tissues. We also examined which genes may be critical for ATAA by performing the integrative analysis of our single-cell RNA sequencing data with publicly available data from genome-wide association studies. Results: We identified 11 major cell types in human ascending aortic tissue; the high-resolution reclustering of these cells further divided them into 40 subtypes. Multiple subtypes were observed for smooth muscle cells, macrophages, and T lymphocytes, suggesting that these cells have multiple functional populations in the aortic wall. In general, ATAA tissues had fewer nonimmune cells and more immune cells, especially T lymphocytes, than control tissues did. Differential gene expression data suggested the presence of extensive mitochondrial dysfunction in ATAA tissues. In addition, integrative analysis of our single-cell RNA sequencing data with public genome-wide association study data and promoter capture Hi-C data suggested that the erythroblast transformation-specific related gene( ERG ) exerts an important role in maintaining normal aortic wall function. Conclusions: Our study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the cellular composition of the ascending aortic wall and reveals how the gene expression landscape is altered in human ATAA tissue. The information from this study makes important contributions to our understanding of ATAA formation and progression.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (574) ◽  
pp. eabe4282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankit Bharat ◽  
Melissa Querrey ◽  
Nikolay S. Markov ◽  
Samuel Kim ◽  
Chitaru Kurihara ◽  
...  

Lung transplantation can potentially be a life-saving treatment for patients with nonresolving COVID-19–associated respiratory failure. Concerns limiting lung transplantation include recurrence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the allograft, technical challenges imposed by viral-mediated injury to the native lung, and the potential risk for allograft infection by pathogens causing ventilator-associated pneumonia in the native lung. Additionally, the native lung might recover, resulting in long-term outcomes preferable to those of transplant. Here, we report the results of lung transplantation in three patients with nonresolving COVID-19–associated respiratory failure. We performed single-molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH) to detect both positive and negative strands of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in explanted lung tissue from the three patients and in additional control lung tissue samples. We conducted extracellular matrix imaging and single-cell RNA sequencing on explanted lung tissue from the three patients who underwent transplantation and on warm postmortem lung biopsies from two patients who had died from COVID-19–associated pneumonia. Lungs from these five patients with prolonged COVID-19 disease were free of SARS-CoV-2 as detected by smFISH, but pathology showed extensive evidence of injury and fibrosis that resembled end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. Using machine learning, we compared single-cell RNA sequencing data from the lungs of patients with late-stage COVID-19 to that from the lungs of patients with pulmonary fibrosis and identified similarities in gene expression across cell lineages. Our findings suggest that some patients with severe COVID-19 develop fibrotic lung disease for which lung transplantation is their only option for survival.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew N. Bernstein ◽  
Zijian Ni ◽  
Michael Collins ◽  
Mark E. Burkard ◽  
Christina Kendziorski ◽  
...  

AbstractBackgroundSingle-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) enables the profiling of genome-wide gene expression at the single-cell level and in so doing facilitates insight into and information about cellular heterogeneity within a tissue. Perhaps nowhere is this more important than in cancer, where tumor and tumor microenvironment heterogeneity directly impact development, maintenance, and progression of disease. While publicly available scRNA-seq cancer datasets offer unprecedented opportunity to better understand the mechanisms underlying tumor progression, metastasis, drug resistance, and immune evasion, much of the available information has been underutilized, in part, due to the lack of tools available for aggregating and analysing these data.ResultsWe present CHARacterizing Tumor Subpopulations (CHARTS), a computational pipeline and web application for analyzing, characterizing, and integrating publicly available scRNA-seq cancer datasets. CHARTS enables the exploration of individual gene expression, cell type, malignancy-status, differentially expressed genes, and gene set enrichment results in subpopulations of cells across multiple tumors and datasets.ConclusionCHARTS is an easy to use, comprehensive platform for exploring single-cell subpopulations within tumors across the ever-growing collection of public scRNA-seq cancer datasets. CHARTS is freely available at charts.morgridge.org.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianwen Ren ◽  
Liangtao Zheng ◽  
Zemin Zhang

ABSTRACTClustering is a prevalent analytical means to analyze single cell RNA sequencing data but the rapidly expanding data volume can make this process computational challenging. New methods for both accurate and efficient clustering are of pressing needs. Here we proposed a new clustering framework based on random projection and feature construction for large scale single-cell RNA sequencing data, which greatly improves clustering accuracy, robustness and computational efficacy for various state-of-the-art algorithms benchmarked on multiple real datasets. On a dataset with 68,578 human blood cells, our method reached 20% improvements for clustering accuracy and 50-fold acceleration but only consumed 66% memory usage compared to the widely-used software package SC3. Compared to k-means, the accuracy improvement can reach 3-fold depending on the concrete dataset. An R implementation of the framework is available from https://github.com/Japrin/sscClust.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Osorio ◽  
Marieke Lydia Kuijjer ◽  
James J. Cai

Motivation: Characterizing cells with rare molecular phenotypes is one of the promises of high throughput single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) techniques. However, collecting enough cells with the desired molecular phenotype in a single experiment is challenging, requiring several samples preprocessing steps to filter and collect the desired cells experimentally before sequencing. Data integration of multiple public single-cell experiments stands as a solution for this problem, allowing the collection of enough cells exhibiting the desired molecular signatures. By increasing the sample size of the desired cell type, this approach enables a robust cell type transcriptome characterization. Results: Here, we introduce rPanglaoDB, an R package to download and merge the uniformly processed and annotated scRNA-seq data provided by the PanglaoDB database. To show the potential of rPanglaoDB for collecting rare cell types by integrating multiple public datasets, we present a biological application collecting and characterizing a set of 157 fibrocytes. Fibrocytes are a rare monocyte-derived cell type, that exhibits both the inflammatory features of macrophages and the tissue remodeling properties of fibroblasts. This constitutes the first fibrocytes' unbiased transcriptome profile report. We compared the transcriptomic profile of the fibrocytes against the fibroblasts collected from the same tissue samples and confirm their associated relationship with healing processes in tissue damage and infection through the activation of the prostaglandin biosynthesis and regulation pathway. Availability and Implementation: rPanglaoDB is implemented as an R package available through the CRAN repositories https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rPanglaoDB.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Poirion ◽  
Xun Zhu ◽  
Travers Ching ◽  
Lana X. Garmire

AbstractDespite its popularity, characterization of subpopulations with transcript abundance is subject to a significant amount of noise. We propose to use effective and expressed nucleotide variations (eeSNVs) from scRNA-seq as alternative features for tumor subpopulation identification. We developed a linear modeling framework, SSrGE, to link eeSNVs associated with gene expression. In all the datasets tested, eeSNVs achieve better accuracies than gene expression for identifying subpopulations. Previously validated cancer-relevant genes are also highly ranked, confirming the significance of the method. Moreover, SSrGE is capable of analyzing coupled DNA-seq and RNA-seq data from the same single cells, demonstrating its value in integrating multi-omics single cell techniques. In summary, SNV features from scRNA-seq data have merits for both subpopulation identification and linkage of genotype-phenotype relationship. The method SSrGE is available at https://github.com/lanagarmire/SSrGE.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Zappia ◽  
Belinda Phipson ◽  
Alicia Oshlack

AbstractAs single-cell RNA sequencing technologies have rapidly developed, so have analysis methods. Many methods have been tested, developed and validated using simulated datasets. Unfortunately, current simulations are often poorly documented, their similarity to real data is not demonstrated, or reproducible code is not available.Here we present the Splatter Bioconductor package for simple, reproducible and well-documented simulation of single-cell RNA-seq data. Splatter provides an interface to multiple simulation methods including Splat, our own simulation, based on a gamma-Poisson distribution. Splat can simulate single populations of cells, populations with multiple cell types or differentiation paths.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John N. Weinstein ◽  
Mary A. Rohrdanz ◽  
Mark Stucky ◽  
James Melott ◽  
Jun Ma ◽  
...  

AbstractOmicPioneer-sc is an open-source data visualization/analysis package that integrates dimensionality-reduction plots (DRPs) such as t-SNE and UMAP with Next-Generation Clustered Heat Maps (NGCHMs) and Pathway Visualization Modules (PVMs) in a seamless, highly interactive exploratory environment. It includes fluent zooming and navigation, a statistical toolkit, dozens of link-outs to external public bioinformatic resources, high-resolution graphics that meet the requirements of all major journals, and the ability to store all metadata needed to reproduce the visualizations at a later time. A user-friendly, multi-panel graphical interface enables non-informaticians to interact with the system without programming, asking and answering questions that require navigation among the three types of modules or extension from them to the Gene Ontology or information on therapies. The visual integration can be useful for detective work to identify and annotate cell-types for color-coding of the DRPs, and multiple NGCHMs can be layered on top of each other (with toggling among them) as an aid to multi-omic analysis. The tools are available in containerized form with APIs to facilitate incorporation as a plug-in to other bioinformatic environments. The capabilities of OmicPioneer-sc are illustrated here through application to a single-cell RNA-seq airway dataset pertinent to the biology of both cancer and COVID-19.[Supplemental material is available for this article.]


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