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
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).
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.
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.
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.