InferCNV is used to explore tumor single cell RNA-Seq data to identify evidence for somatic large-scale chromosomal copy number alterations, such as gains or deletions of entire chromosomes or large segments of chromosomes. This is done by exploring expression intensity of genes across positions of tumor genome in comparison to a set of reference 'normal' cells. A heatmap is generated illustrating the relative expression intensities across each chromosome, and it often becomes readily apparent as to which regions of the tumor genome are over-abundant or less-abundant as compared to that of normal cells.
**Infercnvpy** is a scalable python library to infer copy number variation (CNV) events from single cell transcriptomics data. It is heavliy inspired by InferCNV, but plays nicely with scanpy and is much more scalable.
Many spatially resolved transcriptomic technologies do not have single-cell resolution but measure the average gene expression for each spot from a mixture of cells of potentially heterogeneous cell types.
Here, we introduce a deconvolution method, conditional autoregressive-based deconvolution (CARD), that combines cell-type-specific expression information from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) with correlation in cell-type composition across tissue locations. Modeling spatial correlation allows us to borrow the cell-type composition information across locations, improving accuracy of deconvolution even with a mismatched scRNA-seq reference.
**CARD** can also impute cell-type compositions and gene expression levels at unmeasured tissue locations to enable the construction of a refined spatial tissue map with a resolution arbitrarily higher than that measured in the original study and can perform deconvolution without an scRNA-seq reference.
Applications to four datasets, including a pancreatic cancer dataset, identified multiple cell types and molecular markers with distinct spatial localization that define the progression, heterogeneity and compartmentalization of pancreatic cancer.
Mapping out the coarse-grained connectivity structures of complex manifolds
Biological systems often change over time, as old cells die and new cells are created through differentiation from progenitor cells. This means that at any given time, not all cells will be at the same stage of development. In this sense, a single-cell sample could contain cells at different stages of differentiation. By analyzing the data, we can identify which cells are at which stages and build a model for their biological transitions.
By quantifying the connectivity of partitions (groups, clusters) of the single-cell graph, partition-based graph abstraction (PAGA) generates a much simpler abstracted graph (PAGA graph) of partitions, in which edge weights represent confidence in the presence of connections.
In this notebook, we will introduce the concept of single-cell Trajectory Analysis using PAGA (Partition-based graph abstraction) in the context of hematopoietic differentiation.
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.
Droplet-based single-cell RNA sequence analyses assume that all acquired RNAs are endogenous to cells. However, there is a certain amount of cell-free mRNAs floating in the input solution (referred to as 'the soup'), created from cells in the input solution being lysed. These background mRNAs are then distributed into the droplets with cells and sequenced alongside them, resulting in background contamination that confounds the biological interpretation of single-cell transcriptomic data.
SoupX (Young and Behjati, 2020) is one of the methods proposed for ambient mRNA removal. In this notebook, we will illustrate a workflow example that applies SoupX to correct the ambient RNA in a dataset of 10k PBMC cells. The output of SoupX is a modified counts matrix, which can be used for any downstream analysis tool.