scholarly journals Identifying Differentially Expressed Genes of Zero Inflated Single Cell RNA Sequencing Data Using Mixed Model Score Tests

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang He ◽  
Yueyun Pan ◽  
Fang Shao ◽  
Hui Wang

Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) allows quantitative measurement and comparison of gene expression at the resolution of single cells. Ignoring the batch effects and zero inflation of scRNA-seq data, many proposed differentially expressed (DE) methods might generate bias. We propose a method, single cell mixed model score tests (scMMSTs), to efficiently identify DE genes of scRNA-seq data with batch effects using the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM). scMMSTs treat the batch effect as a random effect. For zero inflation, scMMSTs use a weighting strategy to calculate observational weights for counts independently under zero-inflated and zero-truncated distributions. Counts data with calculated weights were subsequently analyzed using weighted GLMMs. The theoretical null distributions of the score statistics were constructed by mixed Chi-square distributions. Intensive simulations and two real datasets were used to compare edgeR-zinbwave, DESeq2-zinbwave, and scMMSTs. Our study demonstrates that scMMSTs, as supplement to standard methods, are advantageous to define DE genes of zero-inflated scRNA-seq data with batch effects.


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.



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.



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole C. Rondeau ◽  
JJ L. Miranda

We detected precise coordination of RNA levels between two latent genes of the Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) using single-cell RNA sequencing. LANA and vIL6 are expressed during latency by different promoters on remote regions of the episome.…



Genes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prashant N. M. ◽  
Hongyu Liu ◽  
Pavlos Bousounis ◽  
Liam Spurr ◽  
Nawaf Alomran ◽  
...  

With the recent advances in single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies, the estimation of allele expression from single cells is becoming increasingly reliable. Allele expression is both quantitative and dynamic and is an essential component of the genomic interactome. Here, we systematically estimate the allele expression from heterozygous single nucleotide variant (SNV) loci using scRNA-seq data generated on the 10×Genomics Chromium platform. We analyzed 26,640 human adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (from three healthy donors), sequenced to an average of 150K sequencing reads per cell (more than 4 billion scRNA-seq reads in total). High-quality SNV calls assessed in our study contained approximately 15% exonic and >50% intronic loci. To analyze the allele expression, we estimated the expressed variant allele fraction (VAFRNA) from SNV-aware alignments and analyzed its variance and distribution (mono- and bi-allelic) at different minimum sequencing read thresholds. Our analysis shows that when assessing positions covered by a minimum of three unique sequencing reads, over 50% of the heterozygous SNVs show bi-allelic expression, while at a threshold of 10 reads, nearly 90% of the SNVs are bi-allelic. In addition, our analysis demonstrates the feasibility of scVAFRNA estimation from current scRNA-seq datasets and shows that the 3′-based library generation protocol of 10×Genomics scRNA-seq data can be informative in SNV-based studies, including analyses of transcriptional kinetics.



2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 1012-1018
Author(s):  
Jean Acosta ◽  
Daniel Ssozi ◽  
Peter van Galen

The blood system is often represented as a tree-like structure with stem cells that give rise to mature blood cell types through a series of demarcated steps. Although this representation has served as a model of hierarchical tissue organization for decades, single-cell technologies are shedding new light on the abundance of cell type intermediates and the molecular mechanisms that ensure balanced replenishment of differentiated cells. In this Brief Review, we exemplify new insights into blood cell differentiation generated by single-cell RNA sequencing, summarize considerations for the application of this technology, and highlight innovations that are leading the way to understand hematopoiesis at the resolution of single cells. Graphic Abstract: A graphic abstract is available for this article.



Kidney360 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 10.34067/KID.0003682021
Author(s):  
Rachel M B Bell ◽  
Laura Denby

Kidney disease represents a global health burden of increasing prevalence and is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Myeloid cells are a major cellular compartment of the immune system; they are found in the healthy kidney and in increased numbers in the damaged and/or diseased kidney, where they act as key players in the progression of injury, inflammation and fibrosis. They possess enormous plasticity and heterogeneity, adopting different phenotypic and functional characteristics in response to stimuli in the local milieu. Though this inherent complexity remains to be fully understood in the kidney, advances in single-cell genomics promises to change this. Specifically, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has had a transformative effect on kidney research, enabling the profiling and analysis of the transcriptomes of single cells at unprecedented resolution and throughput, and subsequent generation of cell atlases. Moving forward, combining scRNA- and single-nuclear RNA-seq with greater resolution spatial transcriptomics will allow spatial mapping of kidney disease of varying aetiology to further reveal the patterning of immune cells and non-immune renal cells. This review summarises the roles of myeloid cells in kidney health and disease, the experimental workflow in currently available scRNA-seq technologies and published findings using scRNA-seq in the context of myeloid cells and the kidney.



2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Zou ◽  
Tongda Zhang ◽  
Ruilong Zhou ◽  
Xiaosen Jiang ◽  
Huanming Yang ◽  
...  

It is well recognized that batch effect in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains a big challenge when integrating different datasets. Here, we proposed deepMNN, a novel deep learning-based method to correct batch effect in scRNA-seq data. We first searched mutual nearest neighbor (MNN) pairs across different batches in a principal component analysis (PCA) subspace. Subsequently, a batch correction network was constructed by stacking two residual blocks and further applied for the removal of batch effects. The loss function of deepMNN was defined as the sum of a batch loss and a weighted regularization loss. The batch loss was used to compute the distance between cells in MNN pairs in the PCA subspace, while the regularization loss was to make the output of the network similar to the input. The experiment results showed that deepMNN can successfully remove batch effects across datasets with identical cell types, datasets with non-identical cell types, datasets with multiple batches, and large-scale datasets as well. We compared the performance of deepMNN with state-of-the-art batch correction methods, including the widely used methods of Harmony, Scanorama, and Seurat V4 as well as the recently developed deep learning-based methods of MMD-ResNet and scGen. The results demonstrated that deepMNN achieved a better or comparable performance in terms of both qualitative analysis using uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) plots and quantitative metrics such as batch and cell entropies, ARI F1 score, and ASW F1 score under various scenarios. Additionally, deepMNN allowed for integrating scRNA-seq datasets with multiple batches in one step. Furthermore, deepMNN ran much faster than the other methods for large-scale datasets. These characteristics of deepMNN made it have the potential to be a new choice for large-scale single-cell gene expression data analysis.



2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Klimm ◽  
Enrique M. Toledo ◽  
Thomas Monfeuga ◽  
Fang Zhang ◽  
Charlotte M. Deane ◽  
...  

AbstractRecent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have allowed researchers to explore transcriptional function at a cellular level. In this study, we present scPPIN, a method for integrating single-cell RNA sequencing data with protein–protein interaction networks (PPINs) that detects active modules in cells of different transcriptional states. We achieve this by clustering RNA-sequencing data, identifying differentially expressed genes, constructing node-weighted PPINs, and finding the maximum-weight connected subgraphs with an exact Steiner-tree approach. As a case study, we investigate RNA-sequencing data from human liver spheroids but the techniques described here are applicable to other organisms and tissues. scPPIN allows us to expand the output of differential expressed genes analysis with information from protein interactions. We find that different transcriptional states have different subnetworks of the PPIN significantly enriched which represent biological pathways. In these pathways, scPPIN also identifies proteins that are not differentially expressed but have a crucial biological function (e.g., as receptors) and therefore reveals biology beyond a standard differentially expressed gene analysis.



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