scholarly journals scGPS: Determining Cell States and Global Fate Potential of Subpopulations

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Thompson ◽  
Maika Matsumoto ◽  
Tianqi Ma ◽  
Anne Senabouth ◽  
Nathan J. Palpant ◽  
...  

Finding cell states and their transcriptional relatedness is a main outcome from analysing single-cell data. In developmental biology, determining whether cells are related in a differentiation lineage remains a major challenge. A seamless analysis pipeline from cell clustering to estimating the probability of transitions between cell clusters is lacking. Here, we present Single Cell Global fate Potential of Subpopulations (scGPS) to characterise transcriptional relationship between cell states. scGPS decomposes mixed cell populations in one or more samples into clusters (SCORE algorithm) and estimates pairwise transitioning potential (scGPS algorithm) of any pair of clusters. SCORE allows for the assessment and selection of stable clustering results, a major challenge in clustering analysis. scGPS implements a novel approach, with machine learning classification, to flexibly construct trajectory connections between clusters. scGPS also has a feature selection functionality by network and modelling approaches to find biological processes and driver genes that connect cell populations. We applied scGPS in diverse developmental contexts and show superior results compared to a range of clustering and trajectory analysis methods. scGPS is able to identify the dynamics of cellular plasticity in a user-friendly workflow, that is fast and memory efficient. scGPS is implemented in R with optimised functions using C++ and is publicly available in Bioconductor.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Na Yu ◽  
Jin-Xing Liu ◽  
Ying-Lian Gao ◽  
Chun-Hou Zheng ◽  
Junliang Shang ◽  
...  

AbstractThe development of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology has enabled the measurement of gene expression in individual cells. This provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore the biological mechanisms at the cellular level. However, existing scRNA-seq analysis methods are susceptible to noise and outliers or ignore the manifold structure inherent in the data. In this paper, a novel method called Cauchy non-negative Laplacian regularized low-rank representation (CNLLRR) is proposed to alleviate the above problem. Specifically, we employ the Cauchy loss function (CLF) instead of the conventional norm constraints in the noise matrix of CNLLRR, which will enhance the robustness of the method. In addition, graph regularization term is applied to the objective function, which can capture the paired geometric relationships between cells. Then, alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is adopted to solve the optimization problem of CNLLRR. Finally, extensive experiments on scRNA-seq data reveal that the proposed CNLLRR method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for cell clustering, cell visualization and prioritization of gene markers. CNLLRR contributes to understand the heterogeneity between cell populations in complex biological systems.Author summaryAnalysis of single-cell data can help to further study the heterogeneity and complexity of cell populations. The current analysis methods are mainly to learn the similarity between cells and cells. Then they use the clustering algorithm to perform cell clustering or downstream analysis on the obtained similarity matrix. Therefore, constructing accurate cell-to-cell similarity is crucial for single-cell data analysis. In this paper, we design a novel Cauchy non-negative Laplacian regularized low-rank representation (CNLLRR) method to get a better similarity matrix. Specifically, Cauchy loss function (CLF) constraint is applied to punish noise matrix, which will improve the robustness of CNLLRR to noise and outliers. Moreover, graph regularization term is applied to the objective function, which will effectively encode the local manifold information of the data. Further, these will guarantee the quality of the cell-to-cell similarity matrix learned. Finally, single-cell data analysis experiments show that our method is superior to other representative methods.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Stein ◽  
Huidong Chen ◽  
Michael E. Vinyard ◽  
Luca Pinello

ABSTRACTSingle-cell assays have transformed our ability to model heterogeneity within cell populations and tissues. Virtual Reality (VR) has recently emerged as a powerful technology to dynamically explore complex data. However, expensive hardware or advanced data preprocessing skills are required to adapt such technology to single-cell data. To address current shortcomings, we present singlecellVR, a user-friendly website for visualizing single-cell data, designed for cheap and easily available virtual reality hardware (e.g., Google Cardboard, ∼$8). We provide a companion package, scvr to streamline data conversion from the most widely-adopted single-cell analysis tools and a database of pre-analyzed datasets to which users can contribute.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yakir A Reshef ◽  
Laurie Rumker ◽  
Joyce B Kang ◽  
Aparna Nathan ◽  
Megan B Murray ◽  
...  

As single-cell datasets grow in sample size, there is a critical need to characterize cell states that vary across samples and associate with sample attributes like clinical phenotypes. Current statistical approaches typically map cells to cell-type clusters and examine sample differences through that lens alone. Here we present covarying neighborhood analysis (CNA), an unbiased method to identify cell populations of interest with greater flexibility and granularity. CNA characterizes dominant axes of variation across samples by identifying groups of very small regions in transcriptional space, termed neighborhoods, that covary in abundance across samples, suggesting shared function or regulation. CNA can then rigorously test for associations between any sample-level attribute and the abundances of these covarying neighborhood groups. We show in simulation that CNA enables more powerful and accurate identification of disease-associated cell states than a cluster-based approach. When applied to published datasets, CNA captures a Notch activation signature in rheumatoid arthritis, redefines monocyte populations expanded in sepsis, and identifies a previously undiscovered T-cell population associated with progression to active tuberculosis.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena E Strauss ◽  
Paul DW Kirk ◽  
John E Reid ◽  
Lorenz Wernisch

AbstractMotivationMany methods have been developed to cluster genes on the basis of their changes in mRNA expression over time, using bulk RNA-seq or microarray data. However, single-cell data may present a particular challenge for these algorithms, since the temporal ordering of cells is not directly observed. One way to address this is to first use pseudotime methods to order the cells, and then apply clustering techniques for time course data. However, pseudotime estimates are subject to high levels of uncertainty, and failing to account for this uncertainty is liable to lead to erroneous and/or over-confident gene clusters.ResultsThe proposed method, GPseudoClust, is a novel approach that jointly infers pseudotem-poral ordering and gene clusters, and quantifies the uncertainty in both. GPseudoClust combines a recent method for pseudotime inference with nonparametric Bayesian clustering methods, efficient MCMC sampling, and novel subsampling strategies which aid computation. We consider a broad array of simulated and experimental datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of GPseudoClust in a range of settings.AvailabilityAn implementation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/magStra/nonparametricSummaryPSM and https://github.com/magStra/[email protected] informationSupplementary materials are available.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guangyuan Li ◽  
Song Baobao ◽  
H. L Grimes ◽  
V. B. Surya Prasath ◽  
Nathan L Salomonis

Hundreds of bioinformatics approaches now exist to define cellular heterogeneity from single-cell genomics data. Reconciling conflicts between diverse methods, algorithm settings, annotations or modalities have the potential to clarify which populations are real and establish reusable reference atlases. Here, we present a customizable computational strategy called scTrianguate, which leverages cooperative game theory to intelligently mix-and-match clustering solutions from different resolutions, algorithms, reference atlases, or multi-modal measurements. This algorithm relies on a series of robust statistical metrics for cluster stability that work across molecular modalities to identify high-confidence integrated annotations. When applied to annotations from diverse competing cell atlas projects, this approach is able to resolve conflicts and determine the validity of controversial cell population predictions. Tested with scRNA-Seq, CITE-Seq (RNA + surface ADT), multiome (RNA + ATAC), and TEA-Seq (RNA + surface ADT + ATAC), this approach identifies highly stable and reproducible, known and novel cell populations, while excluding clusters defined by technical artifacts (i.e., doublets). Importantly, we find that distinct cell populations are frequently attributed with features from different modalities (RNA, ATAC, ADT) in the same assay, highlighting the importance of multimodal analysis in cluster determination. As it is flexible, this approach can be updated with new user-defined statistical metrics to alter the decision engine and customized to new measures of stability for different measures of cellular activity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elham Azizi ◽  
Sandhya Prabhakaran ◽  
Ambrose Carr ◽  
Dana Pe'er

Single-cell RNA-seq gives access to gene expression measurements for thousands of cells, allowing discovery and characterization of cell types. However, the data is noise-prone due to experimental errors and cell type-specific biases. Current computational approaches for analyzing single-cell data involve a global normalization step which introduces incorrect biases and spurious noise and does not resolve missing data (dropouts). This can lead to misleading conclusions in downstream analyses. Moreover, a single normalization removes important cell type-specific information. We propose a data-driven model, BISCUIT, that iteratively normalizes and clusters cells, thereby separating noise from interesting biological signals. BISCUIT is a Bayesian probabilistic model that learns cell-specific parameters to intelligently drive normalization. This approach displays superior performance to global normalization followed by clustering in both synthetic and real single-cell data compared with previous methods, and allows easy interpretation and recovery of the underlying structure and cell types.


2022 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huijian Feng ◽  
Lihui Lin ◽  
Jiekai Chen

Abstract Background Single-cell RNA sequencing is becoming a powerful tool to identify cell states, reconstruct developmental trajectories, and deconvolute spatial expression. The rapid development of computational methods promotes the insight of heterogeneous single-cell data. An increasing number of tools have been provided for biological analysts, of which two programming languages- R and Python are widely used among researchers. R and Python are complementary, as many methods are implemented specifically in R or Python. However, the different platforms immediately caused the data sharing and transformation problem, especially for Scanpy, Seurat, and SingleCellExperiemnt. Currently, there is no efficient and user-friendly software to perform data transformation of single-cell omics between platforms, which makes users spend unbearable time on data Input and Output (IO), significantly reducing the efficiency of data analysis. Results We developed scDIOR for single-cell data transformation between platforms of R and Python based on Hierarchical Data Format Version 5 (HDF5). We have created a data IO ecosystem between three R packages (Seurat, SingleCellExperiment, Monocle) and a Python package (Scanpy). Importantly, scDIOR accommodates a variety of data types across programming languages and platforms in an ultrafast way, including single-cell RNA-seq and spatial resolved transcriptomics data, using only a few codes in IDE or command line interface. For large scale datasets, users can partially load the needed information, e.g., cell annotation without the gene expression matrices. scDIOR connects the analytical tasks of different platforms, which makes it easy to compare the performance of algorithms between them. Conclusions scDIOR contains two modules, dior in R and diopy in Python. scDIOR is a versatile and user-friendly tool that implements single-cell data transformation between R and Python rapidly and stably. The software is freely accessible at https://github.com/JiekaiLab/scDIOR.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimmy Tsz Hang Lee ◽  
Nikolaos Patikas ◽  
Vladimir Yu Kiselev ◽  
Martin Hemberg

Single cell technologies have made it possible to profile millions of cells, but for these resources to be useful they must be easy to query and access. To facilitate interactive and intuitive access to single cell data we have developed scfind, a search engine for cell atlases. Using transcriptome data from mouse cell atlases we show how scfind can be used to evaluate marker genes, to perform in silico gating, and to identify both cell-type specific and housekeeping genes. Moreover, we have developed a subquery optimization routine to ensure that long and complex queries return meaningful results. To make scfind more user friendly and accessible, we use indices of PubMed abstracts and techniques from natural language processing to allow for arbitrary queries. Finally, we show how scfind can be used for multi-omics analyses by combining single-cell ATAC-seq data with transcriptome data.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snehalika Lall ◽  
Abhik Ghosh ◽  
Sumanta Ray ◽  
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

Abstract Annotation of cells in single-cell clustering requires a homogeneous grouping of cell populations. Since single cell data is susceptible to technical noise, the quality of genes selected prior to clustering is of crucial importance in the preliminary steps of downstream analysis. Therefore, interest in robust gene selection has gained considerable attention in recent years. We introduce sc-REnF, (robust entropy based feature (gene) selection method), aiming to leverage the advantages of Rényi and Tsallis> entropies in gene selection for single cell clustering. Experiments demonstrate that with tuned parameter (q), Rényi and Tsallis entropies select genes that improved the clustering results significantly, over the other competing methods. sc-REnF can capture relevancy and redundancy among the features of noisy data extremely well due to its robust objective function. Moreover, the selected features/genes can able to clusters the unknown cells with a high accuracy. Finally, sc-REnF yields good clustering performance in small sample, large feature scRNA-seq data.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e1008625
Author(s):  
Stephanie C. Hicks ◽  
Ruoxi Liu ◽  
Yuwei Ni ◽  
Elizabeth Purdom ◽  
Davide Risso

Single-cell RNA-Sequencing (scRNA-seq) is the most widely used high-throughput technology to measure genome-wide gene expression at the single-cell level. One of the most common analyses of scRNA-seq data detects distinct subpopulations of cells through the use of unsupervised clustering algorithms. However, recent advances in scRNA-seq technologies result in current datasets ranging from thousands to millions of cells. Popular clustering algorithms, such as k-means, typically require the data to be loaded entirely into memory and therefore can be slow or impossible to run with large datasets. To address this problem, we developed the mbkmeans R/Bioconductor package, an open-source implementation of the mini-batch k-means algorithm. Our package allows for on-disk data representations, such as the common HDF5 file format widely used for single-cell data, that do not require all the data to be loaded into memory at one time. We demonstrate the performance of the mbkmeans package using large datasets, including one with 1.3 million cells. We also highlight and compare the computing performance of mbkmeans against the standard implementation of k-means and other popular single-cell clustering methods. Our software package is available in Bioconductor at https://bioconductor.org/packages/mbkmeans.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document