Power analyses are considered important factors in designing high-quality experiments. However, such analyses remain a challenge in single-cell RNA-seq studies due to the presence of hierarchical structure within the data (Zimmerman et al., 2021). As cells sampled from the same individual share genetic and environmental backgrounds, these cells are more correlated than cells sampled from different individuals. Currently, most power analyses and hypothesis tests (e.g., differential expression) in scRNA-seq data treat cells as if they were independent, thus ignoring the intra-sample correlation, which could lead to incorrect inferences.
Hierarchicell (Zimmerman, K.D. and Langefeld, C.D., 2021) is an R package proposed to estimate power for testing hypotheses of differential expression in scRNA-seq data while considering the hierarchical correlation structure that exists in the data. The method offers four important categories of functions: data loading and cleaning, empirical estimation of distributions, simulating expression data, and computing type 1 error or power.
In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow of Hierarchicell. The notebook is inspired by Hierarchicell's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.
Build single-cell trajectories with the software that introduced **pseudotime**. Find out about cell fate decisions and the genes regulated as they're made.
Group and classify your cells based on gene expression. Identify new cell types and states and the genes that distinguish them.
Find genes that vary between cell types and states, over trajectories, or in response to perturbations using statistically robust, flexible differential analysis.
In development, disease, and throughout life, cells transition from one state to another. Monocle introduced the concept of **pseudotime**, which is a measure of how far a cell has moved through biological progress.
Many researchers are using single-cell RNA-Seq to discover new cell types. Monocle 3 can help you purify them or characterize them further by identifying key marker genes that you can use in follow-up experiments such as immunofluorescence or flow sorting.
**Single-cell trajectory analysis** shows how cells choose between one of several possible end states. The new reconstruction algorithms introduced in Monocle 3 can robustly reveal branching trajectories, along with the genes that cells use to navigate these decisions.
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.
Tumors are complex tissues of cancerous cells surrounded by a heterogeneous cellular microenvironment with which they interact. Single-cell sequencing enables molecular characterization of single cells within the tumor. However, cell annotation—the assignment of cell type or cell state to each sequenced cell—is a challenge, especially identifying tumor cells within single-cell or spatial sequencing experiments.
Here, we propose ikarus, a machine learning pipeline aimed at distinguishing tumor cells from normal cells at the single-cell level. We test ikarus on multiple single-cell datasets, showing that it achieves high sensitivity and specificity in multiple experimental contexts.
**InferCNV** is a Bayesian method, which agglomerates the expression signal of genomically adjointed genes to ascertain whether there is a gain or loss of a certain larger genomic segment. We have used **inferCNV** to call copy number variations in all samples used in the manuscript.
Reconstructing cell type compositions and their gene expression from bulk RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) datasets is an ongoing challenge in cancer research. BayesPrism (Chu, T., Wang, Z., Pe’er, D. et al., 2022) is a Bayesian method used to predict cellular composition and gene expression in individual cell types from bulk RNA-seq datasets, with scRNA-seq as references.
This notebook illustrates an example workflow for bulk RNA-seq deconvolution using BayesPrism. The notebook content is inspired by BayesPrism's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.