Understanding global communications among cells requires accurate representation of cell-cell signaling links and effective systems-level analyses of those links.
We construct a database of interactions among ligands, receptors and their cofactors that accurately represent known heteromeric molecular complexes. We then develop **CellChat**, a tool that is able to quantitatively infer and analyze intercellular communication networks from single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data.
CellChat predicts major signaling inputs and outputs for cells and how those cells and signals coordinate for functions using network analysis and pattern recognition approaches. Through manifold learning and quantitative contrasts, CellChat classifies signaling pathways and delineates conserved and context-specific pathways across different datasets.
Applying **CellChat** to mouse and human skin datasets shows its ability to extract complex signaling patterns.
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) technology has allowed to capture of topographical gene expression profiling of tumor tissues, but single-cell resolution is potentially lost. Identifying cell identities in ST datasets from tumors or other samples remains challenging for existing cell-type deconvolution methods.
Spatial Cellular Estimator for Tumors (SpaCET) is an R package for analyzing cancer ST datasets to estimate cell lineages and intercellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment. Generally, SpaCET infers the malignant cell fraction through a gene pattern dictionary, then calibrates local cell densities and determines immune and stromal cell lineage fractions using a constrained regression model. Finally, the method can reveal putative cell-cell interactions in the tumor microenvironment.
In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow for cell type deconvolution and interaction analysis on breast cancer ST data from 10X Visium. The notebook is inspired by SpaCET's vignettes 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.
Expanded CRISPR-compatible CITE-seq (ECCITE-seq) which is built upon pooled CRISPR screens, allows to simultaneously measure transcriptomes, surface protein levels, and single-guide RNA (sgRNA) sequences at single-cell resolution. The technique enables multimodal characterization of each perturbation and effect exploration. However, it also encounters heterogeneity and complexity which can cause substantial noise into downstream analyses.
Mixscape (Papalexi, Efthymia, et al., 2021) is a computational framework proposed to substantially improve the signal-to-noise ratio in single-cell perturbation screens by identifying and removing confounding sources of variation.
In this notebooks, we demonstrate Mixscape's features using pertpy - a Python package offering a range of tools for perturbation analysis. The original pipeline of Mixscape implemented in R can be found here.
Dynamic expression data, nowadays obtained using high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), are essential to monitor transient gene expression changes and to study the dynamics of their transcriptional activity in the cell or response to stimuli. FunPat is an R package designed to provide:
- a useful tool to analyze time series genomic data;
- a computational pipeline which integrates gene selection, clustering and functional annotations into a single framework to identify the main temporal patterns associated to functional groups of differentially expressed (DE) genes;
- an easy way to exploit different types of annotations from currently available databases (e.g. Gene Ontology) to extract the most meaningful information characterizing the main expression dynamics;
- a user-friendly organization and visualization of the outcome, automatically linking the DE genes and their temporal patterns to the functional information for an easy biological interpretation of the results.