scholarly journals Robustness and timing of cellular differentiation through population-based symmetry breaking

Development ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 148 (3) ◽  
pp. dev197608
Author(s):  
Angel Stanoev ◽  
Christian Schröter ◽  
Aneta Koseska

ABSTRACTDuring mammalian development and homeostasis, cells often transition from a multilineage primed state to one of several differentiated cell types that are marked by the expression of mutually exclusive genetic markers. These observations have been classically explained by single-cell multistability as the dynamical basis of differentiation, where robust cell-type proportioning relies on pre-existing cell-to-cell differences. We propose a conceptually different dynamical mechanism in which cell types emerge and are maintained collectively by cell-cell communication as a novel inhomogeneous state of the coupled system. Differentiation can be triggered by cell number increase as the population grows in size, through organisation of the initial homogeneous population before the symmetry-breaking bifurcation point. Robust proportioning and reliable recovery of the differentiated cell types following a perturbation is an inherent feature of the inhomogeneous state that is collectively maintained. This dynamical mechanism is valid for systems with steady-state or oscillatory single-cell dynamics. Therefore, our results suggest that timing and subsequent differentiation in robust cell-type proportions can emerge from the cooperative behaviour of growing cell populations during development.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Stanoev ◽  
Christian Schröter ◽  
Aneta Koseska

AbstractDuring mammalian development, cell types expressing mutually exclusive genetic markers are differentiated from a multilineage primed state. These observations have invoked single-cell multistability view as the dynamical basis of differentiation. However, the robust regulative nature of mammalian development is not captured therein. Considering the well-established role of cell-cell communication in this process, we propose a fundamentally different dynamical treatment in which cellular identities emerge and are maintained on population level, as a novel unique solution of the coupled system. Subcritical system’s organization here enables symmetry-breaking to be triggered by cell number increase in a timed, self-organized manner. Robust cell type proportions are thereby an inherent feature of the resulting inhomogeneous solution. This framework is generic, as exemplified for early embryogenesis and neurogenesis cases. Distinct from mechanisms that rely on pre-existing asymmetries, we thus demonstrate that robustness and accuracy necessarily emerge from the cooperative behaviour of growing cell populations during development.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Abrams ◽  
Parveen Kumar ◽  
R. Krishna Murthy Karuturi ◽  
Joshy George

AbstractBackgroundThe advent of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) enabled researchers to study transcriptomic activity within individual cells and identify inherent cell types in the sample. Although numerous computational tools have been developed to analyze single cell transcriptomes, there are no published studies and analytical packages available to guide experimental design and to devise suitable analysis procedure for cell type identification.ResultsWe have developed an empirical methodology to address this important gap in single cell experimental design and analysis into an easy-to-use tool called SCEED (Single Cell Empirical Experimental Design and analysis). With SCEED, user can choose a variety of combinations of tools for analysis, conduct performance analysis of analytical procedures and choose the best procedure, and estimate sample size (number of cells to be profiled) required for a given analytical procedure at varying levels of cell type rarity and other experimental parameters. Using SCEED, we examined 3 single cell algorithms using 48 simulated single cell datasets that were generated for varying number of cell types and their proportions, number of genes expressed per cell, number of marker genes and their fold change, and number of single cells successfully profiled in the experiment.ConclusionsBased on our study, we found that when marker genes are expressed at fold change of 4 or more than the rest of the genes, either Seurat or Simlr algorithm can be used to analyze single cell dataset for any number of single cells isolated (minimum 1000 single cells were tested). However, when marker genes are expected to be only up to fC 2 upregulated, choice of the single cell algorithm is dependent on the number of single cells isolated and proportion of rare cell type to be identified. In conclusion, our work allows the assessment of various single cell methods and also aids in examining the single cell experimental design.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aparna Bhaduri ◽  
Tomasz J. Nowakowski ◽  
Alex A. Pollen ◽  
Arnold R. Kriegstein

AbstractHigh throughput methods for profiling the transcriptomes of single cells have recently emerged as transformative approaches for large-scale population surveys of cellular diversity in heterogeneous primary tissues. Efficient generation of such an atlas will depend on sufficient sampling of the diverse cell types while remaining cost-effective to enable a comprehensive examination of organs, developmental stages, and individuals. To examine the relationship between cell number and transcriptional heterogeneity in the context of unbiased cell type classification, we explicitly explored the population structure of a publically available 1.3 million cell dataset from the E18.5 mouse brain. We propose a computational framework for inferring the saturation point of cluster discovery in a single cell mRNA-seq experiment, centered around cluster preservation in downsampled datasets. In addition, we introduce a “complexity index”, which characterizes the heterogeneity of cells in a given dataset. Using Cajal-Retzius cells as an example of a limited complexity dataset, we explored whether biological distinctions relate to technical clustering. Surprisingly, we found that clustering distinctions carrying biologically interpretable meaning are achieved with far fewer cells (20,000). Together, these findings suggest that most of the biologically interpretable insights from the 1.3 million cells can be recapitulated by analyzing 50,000 randomly selected cells, indicating that instead of profiling few individuals at high “cellular coverage”, the much anticipated cell atlasing studies may instead benefit from profiling more individuals, or many time points at lower cellular coverage.Recent efforts seek to create a comprehensive cell atlas of the human body1,2 Current technology, however, makes it precipitously expensive to perform analysis of every cell. Therefore, designing effective sampling strategies be critical to generate a working atlas in an efficient, cost-effective, and streamlined manner. The advent of single cell and single nucleus mRNA sequencing (RNAseq) in droplet format3,4 now enables large scale sampling of cells from any tissue, and a recently released publicly available dataset of 1.3 million single cells from the E18.5 mouse brain generated with the 10X Chromium5 provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between population structure and the number of sampled cells necessary to reveal the underlying diversity of cell types. Here, we present a framework for how researchers can evaluate whether a dataset has reached saturation, and we estimate how many cells would be required to generate an atlas of the sample analyzed here. This framework can be applied to any organ or cell type specific atlas for any organism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei He ◽  
Quan Zhang ◽  
Yue Zhang ◽  
Yixian Fan ◽  
Fahu Yuan ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) has become an ongoing pandemic. Understanding the respiratory immune microenvironment which is composed of multiple cell types, together with cell communication based on ligand–receptor interactions is important for developing vaccines, probing COVID-19 pathogenesis, and improving pandemic control measures. Methods A total of 102 consecutive hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 were enrolled in this study. Clinical information, routine laboratory tests, and flow cytometry analysis data with different conditions were collected and assessed for predictive value in COVID-19 patients. Next, we analyzed public single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, which offers the closest available view of immune cell heterogeneity as encountered in patients with varying severity of COVID-19. A weighting algorithm was used to calculate ligand–receptor interactions, revealing the communication potentially associated with outcomes across cell types. Finally, serum cytokines including IL6, IL1β, IL10, CXCL10, TNFα, GALECTIN-1, and IGF1 derived from patients were measured. Results Of the 102 COVID-19 patients, 42 cases (41.2%) were categorized as severe. Multivariate logistic regression analysis demonstrated that AST, D-dimer, BUN, and WBC were considered as independent risk factors for the severity of COVID-19. T cell numbers including total T cells, CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in the severe disease group were significantly lower than those in the moderate disease group. The risk model containing the above mentioned inflammatory damage parameters, and the counts of T cells, with AUROCs ranged from 0.78 to 0.87. To investigate the molecular mechanism at the cellular level, we analyzed the published scRNA-seq data and found that macrophages displayed specific functional diversity after SARS-Cov-2 infection, and the metabolic pathway activities in the identified macrophage subtypes were influenced by hypoxia status. Importantly, we described ligand–receptor interactions that are related to COVID-19 serverity involving macrophages and T cell subsets by communication analysis. Conclusions Our study showed that macrophages driving ligand–receptor crosstalk contributed to the reduction and exhaustion of CD8+ T cells. The identified crucial cytokine panel, including IL6, IL1β, IL10, CXCL10, IGF1, and GALECTIN-1, may offer the selective targets to improve the efficacy of COVID-19 therapy. Trial registration: This is a retrospective observational study without a trial registration number.


1990 ◽  
Vol 259 (6) ◽  
pp. L415-L425 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Roberts ◽  
D. M. Phillips ◽  
J. P. Mather

A novel epithelial cell from normal neonatal rat lung has been isolated, established, and maintained for multiple passages in the absence of serum, without undergoing crisis or senescence. By careful manipulation of the nutrition/hormonal microenvironment, we have been able to select, from a heterogeneous population, a single epithelial cell type that can maintain highly differentiated features in vitro. This cell type has characteristics of bronchiolar epithelial cells. A clonal line, RL-65, has been selected and observed for greater than 2 yr in continuous culture. It has been characterized by ultrastructural, morphological, and biochemical criteria. The basal medium for this cell line is Ham's F12/Dulbecco's modified Eagle's (DME) medium plus insulin (1 micrograms/ml), human transferrin (10 micrograms/ml), ethanolamine (10(-4) M), phosphoethanolamine (10(-4) M), selenium (2.5 x 10(-8) M), hydrocortisone (2.5 x 10(-7) M), and forskolin (5 microM). The addition of 150 micrograms/ml of bovine pituitary extract to the defined basal medium stimulates a greater than 10-fold increase in cell number and a 50- to 100-fold increase in thymidine incorporation. The addition of retinoic acid results in further enhancement of cell growth and complete inhibition of keratinization. We have demonstrated a strategy that may be applicable to isolating other cell types from the lung and maintaining their differentiated characteristics for long-term culture in vitro. Such a culture system promises to be a useful model in which to study cellular events associated with differentiation and proliferation in the lung and to better understand the molecular mechanisms involved in these events.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Tian ◽  
Fan Zhou ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
Wenping Ma ◽  
Honggui Wu ◽  
...  

SummaryBy circumventing cellular heterogeneity, single cell omics have now been widely utilized for cell typing in human tissues, culminating with the undertaking of human cell atlas aimed at characterizing all human cell types. However, more important are the probing of gene regulatory networks, underlying chromatin architecture and critical transcription factors for each cell type. Here we report the Genomic Architecture of Cells in Tissues (GeACT), a comprehensive genomic data base that collectively address the above needs with the goal of understanding the functional genome in action. GeACT was made possible by our novel single-cell RNA-seq (MALBAC-DT) and ATAC-seq (METATAC) methods of high detectability and precision. We exemplified GeACT by first studying representative organs in human mid-gestation fetus. In particular, correlated gene modules (CGMs) are observed and found to be cell-type-dependent. We linked gene expression profiles to the underlying chromatin states, and found the key transcription factors for representative CGMs.HighlightsGenomic Architecture of Cells in Tissues (GeACT) data for human mid-gestation fetusDetermining correlated gene modules (CGMs) in different cell types by MALBAC-DTMeasuring chromatin open regions in single cells with high detectability by METATACIntegrating transcriptomics and chromatin accessibility to reveal key TFs for a CGM


eLife ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J Tarashansky ◽  
Jacob M Musser ◽  
Margarita Khariton ◽  
Pengyang Li ◽  
Detlev Arendt ◽  
...  

Comparing single-cell transcriptomic atlases from diverse organisms can elucidate the origins of cellular diversity and assist the annotation of new cell atlases. Yet, comparison between distant relatives is hindered by complex gene histories and diversifications in expression programs. Previously, we introduced the self-assembling manifold (SAM) algorithm to robustly reconstruct manifolds from single-cell data (Tarashansky et al., 2019). Here, we build on SAM to map cell atlas manifolds across species. This new method, SAMap, identifies homologous cell types with shared expression programs across distant species within phyla, even in complex examples where homologous tissues emerge from distinct germ layers. SAMap also finds many genes with more similar expression to their paralogs than their orthologs, suggesting paralog substitution may be more common in evolution than previously appreciated. Lastly, comparing species across animal phyla, spanning mouse to sponge, reveals ancient contractile and stem cell families, which may have arisen early in animal evolution.


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.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yun Zhang ◽  
Brian Aevermann ◽  
Rohan Gala ◽  
Richard H. Scheuermann

Reference cell type atlases powered by single cell transcriptomic profiling technologies have become available to study cellular diversity at a granular level. We present FR-Match for matching query datasets to reference atlases with robust and accurate performance for identifying novel cell types and non-optimally clustered cell types in the query data. This approach shows excellent performance for cross-platform, cross-sample type, cross-tissue region, and cross-data modality cell type matching.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew N. Bernstein ◽  
Zhongjie Ma ◽  
Michael Gleicher ◽  
Colin N. Dewey

SummaryCell type annotation is a fundamental task in the analysis of single-cell RNA-sequencing data. In this work, we present CellO, a machine learning-based tool for annotating human RNA-seq data with the Cell Ontology. CellO enables accurate and standardized cell type classification by considering the rich hierarchical structure of known cell types, a source of prior knowledge that is not utilized by existing methods. Furthemore, CellO comes pre-trained on a novel, comprehensive dataset of human, healthy, untreated primary samples in the Sequence Read Archive, which to the best of our knowledge, is the most diverse curated collection of primary cell data to date. CellO’s comprehensive training set enables it to run out-of-the-box on diverse cell types and achieves superior or competitive performance when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, CellO’s linear models are easily interpreted, thereby enabling exploration of cell type-specific expression signatures across the ontology. To this end, we also present the CellO Viewer: a web application for exploring CellO’s models across the ontology.HighlightWe present CellO, a tool for hierarchically classifying cell type from single-cell RNA-seq data against the graph-structured Cell OntologyCellO is pre-trained on a comprehensive dataset comprising nearly all bulk RNA-seq primary cell samples in the Sequence Read ArchiveCellO achieves superior or comparable performance with existing methods while featuring a more comprehensive pre-packaged training setCellO is built with easily interpretable models which we expose through a novel web application, the CellO Viewer, for exploring cell type-specific signatures across the Cell OntologyGraphical Abstract


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