In this notebook, we present COMMOT (COMMunication analysis by Optimal Transport) to infer cell-cell communication (CCC) in spatial transcriptomic, a package that infers CCC by simultaneously considering numerous ligand–receptor pairs for either spatial transcriptomic data or spatially annotated scRNA-seq data equipped with spatial distances between cells estimated from paired spatial imaging data.
A collective optimal transport method is developed to handle complex molecular interactions and spatial constraints. Furthermore, we introduce downstream analysis tools to infer spatial signaling directionality and genes regulated by signaling using machine learning models.
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
Cell2location is a principled Bayesian model that can resolve fine-grained cell types in spatial transcriptomic data and create comprehensive cellular maps of diverse tissues. Cell2location accounts for technical sources of variation and borrows statistical strength across locations, thereby enabling the integration of single cell and spatial transcriptomics with higher sensitivity and resolution than existing tools. This is achieved by estimating which combination of cell types in which cell abundance could have given the mRNA counts in the spatial data, while modelling technical effects (platform/technology effect, contaminating RNA, unexplained variance).
This tutorial shows how to use cell2location method for spatially resolving fine-grained cell types by integrating 10X Visium data with scRNA-seq reference of cell types. Cell2location is a principled Bayesian model that estimates which combination of cell types in which cell abundance could have given the mRNA counts in the spatial data, while modelling technical effects (platform/technology effect, contaminating RNA, unexplained variance).
In the realm of transcriptional dynamics, understanding the intricate interplay of regulatory proteins is crucial for deciphering processes ranging from normal development to disease progression. However, traditional RNA velocity methods often overlook the underlying regulatory drivers of gene expression changes over time. This gap in knowledge hinders our ability to unravel the mechanistic intricacies of these dynamic processes.
scKINETICs (Key regulatory Interaction NETwork for Inferring Cell Speed) (Burdziak et al, 2023) offers a dynamic model for gene expression changes that simultaneously learns per-cell transcriptional velocities and a governing gene regulatory network. By employing an expectation-maximization approach, scKINETICS quantifies the impact of each regulatory element on its target genes, incorporating insights from epigenetic data, gene-gene coexpression patterns and constraints dictated by the phenotypic manifold.
Recent spatial transcriptomics (ST) technologies have allowed us to capture cellular heterogeneity while retaining spatial information. However, ST datasets may lose single-cell resolution, limiting the discovery of cell-type-specific spatial patterns of localization and expression.
spacexr (Spatial-eXpression-R) is an R package providing two methods, i.e., Robust Cell Type Decomposition (RCTD) (Cable, Dylan M., et al., 2022) and Cell type-Specific Inference of Differential Expression (C-SIDE) (Cable, Dylan M., et al., 2022) for ST data. RCTD is proposed for cell type deconvolution, while leveraging references from another annotated single-cell RNA-seq data. C-SIDE identifies cell type-specific differential expression, accounting for localization of other cell types.
We will illustrate an example workflow in two notebooks, RCTD and C-SIDE, on a hippocampus Visium dataset provided by the authors. The notebooks are inspired from spacexr's vignettes and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.