scholarly journals Quantification of alternative 3′UTR isoforms from single cell RNA-seq data with scUTRquant

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mervin M Fansler ◽  
Gang Zhen ◽  
Christine Mayr

Although half of human genes use alternative polyadenylation (APA) to generate mRNA isoforms that encode the same protein but differ in their 3′UTRs, most single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) pipelines only measure gene expression. Here, we describe an open-access pipeline, called scUTRquant (https://github.com/Mayrlab/scUTRquant), that measures gene and 3′UTR isoform expression from scRNA-seq data obtained from known cell types in any species. scUTRquant-derived gene and 3′UTR transcript counts were validated against standard methods which demonstrated their accuracy. 3′UTR isoform quantification was substantially more reproducible than previous methods. scUTRquant provides an atlas of high-confidence 3′ end cleavage sites at single-nucleotide resolution to allow APA comparison across mouse datasets. Analysis of 120 mouse cell types revealed that during differentiation genes either change their expression or they change their 3′UTR isoform usage. Therefore, we identified thousands of genes with 3′UTR isoform changes that have previously not been implicated in specific biological processes.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheng Zhu ◽  
Qiwei Lian ◽  
Wenbin Ye ◽  
Wei Qin ◽  
Zhe Wu ◽  
...  

Abstract Alternative polyadenylation (APA) is a widespread regulatory mechanism of transcript diversification in eukaryotes, which is increasingly recognized as an important layer for eukaryotic gene expression. Recent studies based on single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) have revealed cell-to-cell heterogeneity in APA usage and APA dynamics across different cell types in various tissues, biological processes and diseases. However, currently available APA databases were all collected from bulk 3′-seq and/or RNA-seq data, and no existing database has provided APA information at single-cell resolution. Here, we present a user-friendly database called scAPAdb (http://www.bmibig.cn/scAPAdb), which provides a comprehensive and manually curated atlas of poly(A) sites, APA events and poly(A) signals at the single-cell level. Currently, scAPAdb collects APA information from > 360 scRNA-seq experiments, covering six species including human, mouse and several other plant species. scAPAdb also provides batch download of data, and users can query the database through a variety of keywords such as gene identifier, gene function and accession number. scAPAdb would be a valuable and extendable resource for the study of cell-to-cell heterogeneity in APA isoform usages and APA-mediated gene regulation at the single-cell level under diverse cell types, tissues and species.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 2474-2485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhanying Feng ◽  
Xianwen Ren ◽  
Yuan Fang ◽  
Yining Yin ◽  
Chutian Huang ◽  
...  

Abstract Motivation Single cell RNA-seq data offers us new resource and resolution to study cell type identity and its conversion. However, data analyses are challenging in dealing with noise, sparsity and poor annotation at single cell resolution. Detecting cell-type-indicative markers is promising to help denoising, clustering and cell type annotation. Results We developed a new method, scTIM, to reveal cell-type-indicative markers. scTIM is based on a multi-objective optimization framework to simultaneously maximize gene specificity by considering gene-cell relationship, maximize gene’s ability to reconstruct cell–cell relationship and minimize gene redundancy by considering gene–gene relationship. Furthermore, consensus optimization is introduced for robust solution. Experimental results on three diverse single cell RNA-seq datasets show scTIM’s advantages in identifying cell types (clustering), annotating cell types and reconstructing cell development trajectory. Applying scTIM to the large-scale mouse cell atlas data identifies critical markers for 15 tissues as ‘mouse cell marker atlas’, which allows us to investigate identities of different tissues and subtle cell types within a tissue. scTIM will serve as a useful method for single cell RNA-seq data mining. Availability and implementation scTIM is freely available at https://github.com/Frank-Orwell/scTIM. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Author(s):  
Xiaohui Wu ◽  
Tao Liu ◽  
Congting Ye ◽  
Wenbin Ye ◽  
Guoli Ji

Abstract Alternative polyadenylation (APA) generates diverse mRNA isoforms, which contributes to transcriptome diversity and gene expression regulation by affecting mRNA stability, translation and localization in cells. The rapid development of 3′ tag-based single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies, such as CEL-seq and 10x Genomics, has led to the emergence of computational methods for identifying APA sites and profiling APA dynamics at single-cell resolution. However, existing methods fail to detect the precise location of poly(A) sites or sites with low read coverage. Moreover, they rely on priori genome annotation and can only detect poly(A) sites located within or near annotated genes. Here we proposed a tool called scAPAtrap for detecting poly(A) sites at the whole genome level in individual cells from 3′ tag-based scRNA-seq data. scAPAtrap incorporates peak identification and poly(A) read anchoring, enabling the identification of the precise location of poly(A) sites, even for sites with low read coverage. Moreover, scAPAtrap can identify poly(A) sites without using priori genome annotation, which helps locate novel poly(A) sites in previously overlooked regions and improve genome annotation. We compared scAPAtrap with two latest methods, scAPA and Sierra, using scRNA-seq data from different experimental technologies and species. Results show that scAPAtrap identified poly(A) sites with higher accuracy and sensitivity than competing methods and could be used to explore APA dynamics among cell types or the heterogeneous APA isoform expression in individual cells. scAPAtrap is available at https://github.com/BMILAB/scAPAtrap.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruizhu Huang ◽  
Charlotte Soneson ◽  
Pierre-Luc Germain ◽  
Thomas S.B. Schmidt ◽  
Christian Von Mering ◽  
...  

AbstracttreeclimbR is for analyzing hierarchical trees of entities, such as phylogenies or cell types, at different resolutions. It proposes multiple candidates that capture the latent signal and pinpoints branches or leaves that contain features of interest, in a data-driven way. It outperforms currently available methods on synthetic data, and we highlight the approach on various applications, including microbiome and microRNA surveys as well as single-cell cytometry and RNA-seq datasets. With the emergence of various multi-resolution genomic datasets, treeclimbR provides a thorough inspection on entities across resolutions and gives additional flexibility to uncover biological associations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 100705
Author(s):  
Matthew N. Bernstein ◽  
Colin N. Dewey
Keyword(s):  

BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy M. Yamawaki ◽  
Daniel R. Lu ◽  
Daniel C. Ellwanger ◽  
Dev Bhatt ◽  
Paolo Manzanillo ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Elucidation of immune populations with single-cell RNA-seq has greatly benefited the field of immunology by deepening the characterization of immune heterogeneity and leading to the discovery of new subtypes. However, single-cell methods inherently suffer from limitations in the recovery of complete transcriptomes due to the prevalence of cellular and transcriptional dropout events. This issue is often compounded by limited sample availability and limited prior knowledge of heterogeneity, which can confound data interpretation. Results Here, we systematically benchmarked seven high-throughput single-cell RNA-seq methods. We prepared 21 libraries under identical conditions of a defined mixture of two human and two murine lymphocyte cell lines, simulating heterogeneity across immune-cell types and cell sizes. We evaluated methods by their cell recovery rate, library efficiency, sensitivity, and ability to recover expression signatures for each cell type. We observed higher mRNA detection sensitivity with the 10x Genomics 5′ v1 and 3′ v3 methods. We demonstrate that these methods have fewer dropout events, which facilitates the identification of differentially-expressed genes and improves the concordance of single-cell profiles to immune bulk RNA-seq signatures. Conclusion Overall, our characterization of immune cell mixtures provides useful metrics, which can guide selection of a high-throughput single-cell RNA-seq method for profiling more complex immune-cell heterogeneity usually found in vivo.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerem Wainer Katsir ◽  
Michal Linial

AbstractBackgroundIn mammals, sex chromosomes pose an inherent imbalance of gene expression between sexes. In each female somatic cell, random inactivation of one of the X-chromosomes restores this balance. While most genes from the inactivated X-chromosome are silenced, 15-25% are known to escape X-inactivation (termed escapees). The expression levels of these genes are attributed to sex-dependent phenotypic variability.ResultsWe used single-cell RNA-Seq to detect escapees in somatic cells. As only one X-chromosome is inactivated in each cell, the origin of expression from the active or inactive chromosome can be determined from the variation of sequenced RNAs. We analyzed primary, healthy fibroblasts (n=104), and clonal lymphoblasts with sequenced parental genomes (n=25) by measuring the degree of allelic-specific expression (ASE) from heterozygous sites. We identified 24 and 49 candidate escapees, at varying degree of confidence, from the fibroblast and lymphoblast transcriptomes, respectively. We critically test the validity of escapee annotations by comparing our findings with a large collection of independent studies. We find that most genes (66%) from the unified set were previously reported as escapees. Furthermore, out of the overlooked escapees, 11 are long noncoding RNA (lncRNAs).ConclusionsX-chromosome inactivation and escaping from it are robust, permanent phenomena that are best studies at a single-cell resolution. The cumulative information from individual cells increases the potential of identifying escapees. Moreover, despite the use of a limited number of cells, clonal cells (i.e., same X-chromosomes are coordinately inhibited) with genomic phasing are valuable for detecting escapees at high confidence. Generalizing the method to uncharacterized genomic loci resulted in lncRNAs escapees which account for 20% of the listed candidates. By confirming genes as escapees and propose others as candidates from two different cell types, we contribute to the cumulative knowledge and reliability of human escapees.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohit Goyal ◽  
Guillermo Serrano ◽  
Ilan Shomorony ◽  
Mikel Hernaez ◽  
Idoia Ochoa

AbstractSingle-cell RNA-seq is a powerful tool in the study of the cellular composition of different tissues and organisms. A key step in the analysis pipeline is the annotation of cell-types based on the expression of specific marker genes. Since manual annotation is labor-intensive and does not scale to large datasets, several methods for automated cell-type annotation have been proposed based on supervised learning. However, these methods generally require feature extraction and batch alignment prior to classification, and their performance may become unreliable in the presence of cell-types with very similar transcriptomic profiles, such as differentiating cells. We propose JIND, a framework for automated cell-type identification based on neural networks that directly learns a low-dimensional representation (latent code) in which cell-types can be reliably determined. To account for batch effects, JIND performs a novel asymmetric alignment in which the transcriptomic profile of unseen cells is mapped onto the previously learned latent space, hence avoiding the need of retraining the model whenever a new dataset becomes available. JIND also learns cell-type-specific confidence thresholds to identify and reject cells that cannot be reliably classified. We show on datasets with and without batch effects that JIND classifies cells more accurately than previously proposed methods while rejecting only a small proportion of cells. Moreover, JIND batch alignment is parallelizable, being more than five or six times faster than Seurat integration. Availability: https://github.com/mohit1997/JIND.


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