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.
CellRank2 (Weiler et al, 2023) is a powerful framework for studying cellular fate using single-cell RNA sequencing data. It can handle millions of cells and different data types efficiently. This tool can identify cell fate and probabilities across various data sets. It also allows for analyzing transitions over time and uncovering key genes in developmental processes. Additionally, CellRank2 estimates cell-specific transcription and degradation rates, aiding in understanding differentiation trajectories and regulatory mechanisms.
In this notebook, we will use a primary tumor sample of patient T71 from the dataset GSE137804 (Dong R. et al, 2020) as an example. We have performed RNA-velocity analysis and pseudotime calculation on this dataset in scVelo (Bergen et al, 2020) notebook. The output will be then loaded into this CellRank2 notebook for further analysis.
This notebook is based on the tutorial provided on CellRank2 documentation. We have modified the notebook and changed the input data to show how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.
The recent development of experimental methods for measuring chromatin state at single-cell resolution has created a need for computational tools capable of analyzing these datasets. Here we developed Signac, a framework for the analysis of single-cell chromatin data, as an extension of the Seurat R toolkit for single-cell multimodal analysis.
**Signac** enables an end-to-end analysis of single-cell chromatin data, including peak calling, quantification, quality control, dimension reduction, clustering, integration with single-cell gene expression datasets, DNA motif analysis, and interactive visualization.
Furthermore, Signac facilitates the analysis of multimodal single-cell chromatin data, including datasets that co-assay DNA accessibility with gene expression, protein abundance, and mitochondrial genotype. We demonstrate scaling of the Signac framework to datasets containing over 700,000 cells.
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.
Computational methods have been proposed to leverage spatially resolved transcriptomic data, pinpointing genes with spatial expression patterns and delineating tissue domains. However, existing approaches fall short in uniformly quantifying spatially variable genes (SVGs). Moreover, from a methodological viewpoint, while SVGs are naturally associated with depicting spatial domains, they are technically dissociated in most methods.
Here, PROST is a flexible framework to quantify gene spatial expression patterns and detect spatial tissue domains using spatially resolved transcriptomics with various resolutions. PROST consists of two independent workflows: PROST Index (PI) and PROST Neural Network (PNN).
Using PROST you can do:
* Quantitative identification of spatial patterns of gene expression changes by the proposed PROST Index (PI).
* Unsupervised identification of spatial tissue domains using a PROST Neural Network (PNN) via a self-attention mechanism.