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.
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
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 (scRNA-seq) data have allowed us to investigate cellular heterogeneity and the kinetics of a biological process. Some studies need to understand how cells change state, and corresponding genes during the process, but it is challenging to track the cell development in scRNA-seq protocols. Therefore, a variety of statistical and computational methods have been proposed for lineage inference (or pseudotemporal ordering) to reconstruct the states of cells according to the developmental process from the measured snapshot data. Specifically, lineage refers to an ordered transition of cellular states, where individual cells represent points along. pseudotime is a one-dimensional variable representing each cell’s transcriptional progression toward the terminal state.
Slingshot which is one of the methods suggested for lineage reconstruction and pseudotime inference from single-cell gene expression data. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow for cell lineage and pseudotime inference using Slingshot. The notebook is inspired by Slingshot's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.
Single-molecule spatial transcriptomics protocols based on in situ sequencing or multiplexed RNA fluorescent hybridization can reveal detailed tissue organization. However, distinguishing the boundaries of individual cells in such data is challenging and can hamper downstream analysis.
Baysor is a tool for performing cell segmentation on imaging-based spatial transcriptomics data. It optimizes two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) cell boundaries segmentation considering the likelihood of transcriptional composition, size and shape of the cell (cell morphology). The approach can take into account nuclear or cytoplasm staining, however, can also perform segmentation based on the detected molecules alone.