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.
Geneformer is a foundation transformer model pretrained on a large-scale corpus of ~30 million single cell transcriptomes to enable context-aware predictions in settings with limited data in network biology. Here, we will demonstrate a basic workflow to work with ***Geneformer*** models.
These notebooks include the instruction to:
1. Prepare input datasets
2. Finetune Geneformer model to perform specific task
3. Using finetuning models for cell classification and gene classification application
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.
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.
Charting an organs’ biological atlas requires us to spatially resolve the entire single-cell transcriptome, and to relate such cellular features to the anatomical scale. Single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-seq (sc/snRNA-seq) can profile cells comprehensively, but lose spatial information.
Spatial transcriptomics allows for spatial measurements, but at lower resolution and with limited sensitivity. Targeted in situ technologies solve both issues, but are limited in gene throughput. To overcome these limitations we present Tangram, a method that aligns sc/snRNA-seq data to various forms of spatial data collected from the same region, including MERFISH, STARmap, smFISH, Spatial Transcriptomics (Visium) and histological images.
**Tangram** can map any type of sc/snRNA-seq data, including multimodal data such as those from SHARE-seq, which we used to reveal spatial patterns of chromatin accessibility. We demonstrate Tangram on healthy mouse brain tissue, by reconstructing a genome-wide anatomically integrated spatial map at single-cell resolution of the visual and somatomotor areas.