Single-cell RNA-seq datasets in diverse biological and clinical conditions provide great opportunities for the full transcriptional characterization of cell types.
However, the integration of these datasets is challeging as they remain biological and techinical differences. **Harmony** is an algorithm allowing fast, sensitive and accurate single-cell data integration.
Expanded CRISPR-compatible CITE-seq (ECCITE-seq) which is built upon pooled CRISPR screens, allows to simultaneously measure transcriptomes, surface protein levels, and single-guide RNA (sgRNA) sequences at single-cell resolution. The technique enables multimodal characterization of each perturbation and effect exploration. However, it also encounters heterogeneity and complexity which can cause substantial noise into downstream analyses.
Mixscape (Papalexi, Efthymia, et al., 2021) is a computational framework proposed to substantially improve the signal-to-noise ratio in single-cell perturbation screens by identifying and removing confounding sources of variation.
In this notebooks, we demonstrate Mixscape's features using pertpy - a Python package offering a range of tools for perturbation analysis. The original pipeline of Mixscape implemented in R can be found here.
PopV uses popular vote of a variety of cell-type transfer tools to classify cell-types in a query dataset based on a test dataset.
Using this variety of algorithms, they compute the agreement between those algorithms and use this agreement to predict which cell-types have a high likelihood of the same cell-types observed in the reference.
Computational methods that model how the gene expression of a cell is influenced by interacting cells are lacking.
We present NicheNet, a method that predicts ligand–target links between interacting cells by combining their expression data with prior knowledge of signaling and gene regulatory networks.
We applied NicheNet to the tumor and immune cell microenvironment data and demonstrated that NicheNet can infer active ligands and their gene regulatory effects on interacting cells.
The simultaneous measurement of multiple modalities represents an exciting frontier for single-cell genomics and necessitates computational methods that can define cellular states based on multimodal data.
Here, we introduce "weighted-nearest neighbor" analysis, an unsupervised framework to learn the relative utility of each data type in each cell, enabling an integrative analysis of multiple modalities. We apply our procedure to a CITE-seq dataset of 211,000 human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) with panels extending to 228 antibodies to construct a multimodal reference atlas of the circulating immune system. Multimodal analysis substantially improves our ability to resolve cell states, allowing us to identify and validate previously unreported lymphoid subpopulations.
Moreover, we demonstrate how to leverage this reference to rapidly map new datasets and to interpret immune responses to vaccination and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Our approach represents a broadly applicable strategy to analyze single-cell multimodal datasets and to look beyond the transcriptome toward a unified and multimodal definition of cellular identity.