scholarly journals Network-Based Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data Imputation Enhances Cell Type Identification

Genes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Zand ◽  
Jianhua Ruan

Single-cell RNA sequencing is a powerful technology for obtaining transcriptomes at single-cell resolutions. However, it suffers from dropout events (i.e., excess zero counts) since only a small fraction of transcripts get sequenced in each cell during the sequencing process. This inherent sparsity of expression profiles hinders further characterizations at cell/gene-level such as cell type identification and downstream analysis. To alleviate this dropout issue we introduce a network-based method, netImpute, by leveraging the hidden information in gene co-expression networks to recover real signals. netImpute employs Random Walk with Restart (RWR) to adjust the gene expression level in a given cell by borrowing information from its neighbors in a gene co-expression network. Performance evaluation and comparison with existing tools on simulated data and seven real datasets show that netImpute substantially enhances clustering accuracy and data visualization clarity, thanks to its effective treatment of dropouts. While the idea of netImpute is general and can be applied with other types of networks such as cell co-expression network or protein–protein interaction (PPI) network, evaluation results show that gene co-expression network is consistently more beneficial, presumably because PPI network usually lacks cell type context, while cell co-expression network can cause information loss for rare cell types. Evaluation results on several biological datasets show that netImpute can more effectively recover missing transcripts in scRNA-seq data and enhance the identification and visualization of heterogeneous cell types than existing methods.

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


Cephalalgia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (13) ◽  
pp. 1976-1983 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Renthal

Background Migraine is a debilitating disorder characterized by severe headaches and associated neurological symptoms. A key challenge to understanding migraine has been the cellular complexity of the human brain and the multiple cell types implicated in its pathophysiology. The present study leverages recent advances in single-cell transcriptomics to localize the specific human brain cell types in which putative migraine susceptibility genes are expressed. Methods The cell-type specific expression of both familial and common migraine-associated genes was determined bioinformatically using data from 2,039 individual human brain cells across two published single-cell RNA sequencing datasets. Enrichment of migraine-associated genes was determined for each brain cell type. Results Analysis of single-brain cell RNA sequencing data from five major subtypes of cells in the human cortex (neurons, oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, microglia, and endothelial cells) indicates that over 40% of known migraine-associated genes are enriched in the expression profiles of a specific brain cell type. Further analysis of neuronal migraine-associated genes demonstrated that approximately 70% were significantly enriched in inhibitory neurons and 30% in excitatory neurons. Conclusions This study takes the next step in understanding the human brain cell types in which putative migraine susceptibility genes are expressed. Both familial and common migraine may arise from dysfunction of discrete cell types within the neurovascular unit, and localization of the affected cell type(s) in an individual patient may provide insight into to their susceptibility to migraine.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanbyeol Kim ◽  
Joongho Lee ◽  
Keunsoo Kang ◽  
Seokhyun Yoon

Abstract Cell type identification is a key step to downstream analysis of single cell RNA-seq experiments. Indispensible information for this is gene expression, which is used to cluster cells, train the model and set rejection thresholds. Problem is they are subject to batch effect arising from different platforms and preprocessing. We present MarkerCount, which uses the number of markers expressed regardless of their expression level to initially identify cell types and, then, reassign cell type in cluster-basis. MarkerCount works both in reference and marker-based mode, where the latter utilizes only the existing lists of markers, while the former required pre-annotated dataset to train the model. The performance was evaluated and compared with the existing identifiers, both marker and reference-based, that can be customized with publicly available datasets and marker DB. The results show that MarkerCount provides a stable performance when comparing with other reference-based and marker-based cell type identifiers.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoheng Liang ◽  
Jason Willis ◽  
Jinzhuang Dou ◽  
Vakul Mohanty ◽  
Yuefan Huang ◽  
...  

1AbstractCellular heterogeneity underlies cancer evolution and metastasis. Advances in single-cell technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing and mass cytometry have enabled interrogation of cell type-specific expression profiles and abundance across heterogeneous cancer samples obtained from clinical trials and preclinical studies. However, challenges remain in determining sample sizes needed for ascertaining changes in cell type abundances in a controlled study. To address this statistical challenge, we have developed a new approach, named Sensei, to determine the number of samples and the number of cells that are required to ascertain such changes between two groups of samples in single-cell studies. Sensei expands the t-test and models the cell abundances using a beta-binomial distribution. We evaluate the mathematical accuracy of Sensei and provide practical guidelines on over 20 cell types in over 30 cancer types based on knowledge acquired from the cancer cell atlas (TCGA) and prior single-cell studies. We provide a web application to enable user-friendly study design via https://kchen-lab.github.io/sensei/table_beta.html.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongyi Xin ◽  
Qi Yan ◽  
Yale Jiang ◽  
Qiuyu Lian ◽  
Jiadi Luo ◽  
...  

AbstractIdentifying and removing multiplets from downstream analysis is essential to improve the scalability and reliability of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). High multiplet rates create artificial cell types in the dataset. Sample barcoding, including the cell hashing technology and the MULTI-seq technology, enables analytical identification of a fraction of multiplets in a scRNA-seq dataset.We propose a Gaussian-mixture-model-based multiplet identification method, GMM-Demux. GMM-Demux accurately identifies and removes the sample-barcoding-detectable multiplets and estimates the percentage of sample-barcoding-undetectable multiplets in the remaining dataset. GMM-Demux describes the droplet formation process with an augmented binomial probabilistic model, and uses the model to authenticate cell types discovered from a scRNA-seq dataset.We conducted two cell-hashing experiments, collected a public cell-hashing dataset, and generated a simulated cellhashing dataset. We compared the classification result of GMM-Demux against a state-of-the-art heuristic-based classifier. We show that GMM-Demux is more accurate, more stable, reduces the error rate by up to 69×, and is capable of reliably recognizing 9 multiplet-induced fake cell types and 8 real cell types in a PBMC scRNA-seq dataset.


2022 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoheng Liang ◽  
Jason Willis ◽  
Jinzhuang Dou ◽  
Vakul Mohanty ◽  
Yuefan Huang ◽  
...  

AbstractCellular heterogeneity underlies cancer evolution and metastasis. Advances in single-cell technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing and mass cytometry have enabled interrogation of cell type-specific expression profiles and abundance across heterogeneous cancer samples obtained from clinical trials and preclinical studies. However, challenges remain in determining sample sizes needed for ascertaining changes in cell type abundances in a controlled study. To address this statistical challenge, we have developed a new approach, named Sensei, to determine the number of samples and the number of cells that are required to ascertain such changes between two groups of samples in single-cell studies. Sensei expands the t-test and models the cell abundances using a beta-binomial distribution. We evaluate the mathematical accuracy of Sensei and provide practical guidelines on over 20 cell types in over 30 cancer types based on knowledge acquired from the cancer cell atlas (TCGA) and prior single-cell studies. We provide a web application to enable user-friendly study design via https://kchen-lab.github.io/sensei/table_beta.html.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (D1) ◽  
pp. D1413-D1419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianyi Zhao ◽  
Shuxuan Lyu ◽  
Guilin Lu ◽  
Liran Juan ◽  
Xi Zeng ◽  
...  

Abstract SC2disease (http://easybioai.com/sc2disease/) is a manually curated database that aims to provide a comprehensive and accurate resource of gene expression profiles in various cell types for different diseases. With the development of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies, uncovering cellular heterogeneity of different tissues for different diseases has become feasible by profiling transcriptomes across cell types at the cellular level. In particular, comparing gene expression profiles between different cell types and identifying cell-type-specific genes in various diseases offers new possibilities to address biological and medical questions. However, systematic, hierarchical and vast databases of gene expression profiles in human diseases at the cellular level are lacking. Thus, we reviewed the literature prior to March 2020 for studies which used scRNA-seq to study diseases with human samples, and developed the SC2disease database to summarize all the data by different diseases, tissues and cell types. SC2disease documents 946 481 entries, corresponding to 341 cell types, 29 tissues and 25 diseases. Each entry in the SC2disease database contains comparisons of differentially expressed genes between different cell types, tissues and disease-related health status. Furthermore, we reanalyzed gene expression matrix by unified pipeline to improve the comparability between different studies. For each disease, we also compare cell-type-specific genes with the corresponding genes of lead single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to implicate cell type specificity of the traits.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoheng Liang ◽  
Jason Willis ◽  
Jinzhuang Dou ◽  
Vakul Mohanty ◽  
Yuefan Huang ◽  
...  

Abstract Cellular heterogeneity underlies cancer evolution and metastasis. Advances in single-cell technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing and mass cytometry have enabled interrogation of cell type-specific expression profiles and abundance across heterogeneous cancer samples obtained from clinical trials and preclinical studies. However, challenges remain in determining sample sizes needed for ascertaining changes in cell type abundances in a controlled study. To address this statistical challenge, we have developed a new approach, named Sensei, to determine the number of samples and the number of cells that are required to ascertain such changes between two groups of samples in single-cell studies. Sensei expands the t-test and models the cell abundances using a beta-binomial distribution. We evaluate the mathematical accuracy of Sensei and provide practical guidelines on over 20 cell types in over 30 cancer types based on knowledge acquired from the cancer cell atlas (TCGA) and prior single-cell studies. We provide a web application to enable user-friendly study design via https://kchen-lab.github.io/sensei/table_beta.html.


Author(s):  
Elisa Donnard ◽  
Huan Shu ◽  
Manuel Garber

AbstractDespite advances in understanding the pathophysiology of Fragile X syndrome (FXS), its molecular bases are still poorly understood. Whole brain tissue expression profiles have proved surprisingly uninformative. We applied single cell RNA sequencing to profile a FXS mouse model. We found that FXS results in a highly cell type specific effect and it is strongest among different neuronal types. We detected a downregulation of mRNAs bound by FMRP and this effect is prominent in neurons. Metabolic pathways including translation are significantly upregulated across all cell types with the notable exception of excitatory neurons. These effects point to a potential difference in the activity of mTOR pathways, and together with other dysregulated pathways suggest an excitatory-inhibitory imbalance in the FXS cortex which is exacerbated by astrocytes. Our data demonstrate the cell-type specific complexity of FXS and provide a resource for interrogating the biological basis of this disorder.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Xue ◽  
Lin Jiang ◽  
Qihan Long ◽  
Ying Chen ◽  
Xiangyi Li ◽  
...  

AbstractAfter centuries of genetic studies, one of the most fundamental questions, i.e. in what cell types do DNA mutations regulate a phenotype, remains unanswered for most complex phenotypes. The current availability of hundreds of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) of millions of cells provides a unique opportunity to address the question. In the present study, we firstly constructed an association landscape between over 20,000 single cell clusters and 997 complex phenotypes by a cross annotation framework with scRNA-seq expression profiles and GWAS summary statistics. We then performed an extensive overview of cell-type specificity and pleiotropy in human phenotypes and found most phenotypes (>90%) were moderately selectively associated with a limited number of cell types while a small fraction cell types (<10%) had strong pleiotropy in multiple phenotypes (~100). Moreover, we identified three cell type-phenotype mutual pleiotropy blocks in the landscape. The application of the single cell type-phenotype cross annotation framework (named SPA) also explained the T cell biased lymphopenia and suggested important supporting genes in severe COVID-19 from human genetics angle. All the cell type-phenotype association results can be queried and visualized at http://pmglab.top/spa.


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