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BioTuring
Single-cell RNA-seq datasets in diverse biological and clinical conditions provide great opportunities for the full transcriptional characterization of cell types.
However, the integration of these datasets is challeging as they remain biological and techinical differences. **Harmony** is an algorithm allowing fast, sensitive and accurate single-cell data integration.
BioTuring
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.
BioTuring
PopV uses popular vote of a variety of cell-type transfer tools to classify cell-types in a query dataset based on a test dataset.
Using this variety of algorithms, they compute the agreement between those algorithms and use this agreement to predict which cell-types have a high likelihood of the same cell-types observed in the reference.
BioTuring
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.
Trends
BioTuring
Cell–cell communication mediated by ligand–receptor complexes is critical to coordinating diverse biological processes, such as development, differentiation and inflammation.
To investigate how the context-dependent crosstalk of different cell types enables physiological processes to proceed, we developed CellPhoneDB, a novel repository of ligands, receptors and their interactions. In contrast to other repositories, our database takes into account the subunit architecture of both ligands and receptors, representing heteromeric complexes accurately.
We integrated our resource with a statistical framework that predicts enriched cellular interactions between two cell types from single-cell transcriptomics data. Here, we outline the structure and content of our repository, provide procedures for inferring cell–cell communication networks from single-cell RNA sequencing data and present a practical step-by-step guide to help implement the protocol.
CellPhoneDB v.2.0 is an updated version of our resource that incorporates additional functionalities to enable users to introduce new interacting molecules and reduces the time and resources needed to interrogate large datasets.
CellPhoneDB v.2.0 is publicly available, both as code and as a user-friendly web interface; it can be used by both experts and researchers with little experience in computational genomics.
In our protocol, we demonstrate how to evaluate meaningful biological interactions with CellPhoneDB v.2.0 using published datasets. This protocol typically takes ~2 h to complete, from installation to statistical analysis and visualization, for a dataset of ~10 GB, 10,000 cells and 19 cell types, and using five threads.