Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data often encountered technical artifacts called "doublets" which are two cells that are sequenced under the same cellular barcode. Doublets formed from different cell types or states are called heterotypic and homotypic otherwise. These factors constrain cell throughput and may result in misleading biological interpretations. DoubletFinder (McGinnis, Murrow, and Gartner 2019) is one of the methods proposed for doublet detection. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow of DoubletFinder. We use a 10x Genomics dataset which captures peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from a healthy donor stained with a panel of 31 TotalSeq™-B antibodies (BioLegend).

Single-cell RNA sequencing methods can profile the transcriptomes of single cells but cannot preserve spatial information. Conversely, spatial transcriptomics assays can profile spatial regions in tissue sections but do not have single-cell resolution. Here, Runmin Wei (Siyuan He, Shanshan Bai, Emi Sei, Min Hu, Alastair Thompson, Ken Chen, Savitri Krishnamurthy & Nicholas E. Navin) developed a computational method called CellTrek that combines these two datasets to achieve single-cell spatial mapping through coembedding and metric learning approaches. They benchmarked CellTrek using simulation and in situ hybridization datasets, which demonstrated its accuracy and robustness. They then applied CellTrek to existing mouse brain and kidney datasets and showed that CellTrek can detect topological patterns of different cell types and cell states. They performed single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics experiments on two ductal carcinoma in situ tissues and applied CellTrek to identify tumor subclones that were restricted to different ducts, and specific T-cell states adjacent to the tumor areas.

The development of large-scale single-cell atlases has allowed describing cell states in a more detailed manner. Meanwhile, current deep leanring methods enable rapid analysis of newly generated query datasets by mapping them into reference atlases. expiMap (‘explainable programmable mapper’) Lotfollahi, Mohammad, et al. is one of the methods proposed for single-cell reference mapping. Furthermore, it incorporates prior knowledge from gene sets databases or users to analyze query data in the context of known gene programs (GPs).