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.
Spatially resolved gene expression profiles are key to understand tissue organization and function. However, spatial transcriptomics (ST) profiling techniques lack single-cell resolution and require a combination with single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) information to deconvolute the spatially indexed datasets.
Leveraging the strengths of both data types, we developed SPOTlight, a computational tool that enables the integration of ST with scRNA-seq data to infer the location of cell types and states within a complex tissue. SPOTlight is centered around a seeded non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) regression, initialized using cell-type marker genes and non-negative least squares (NNLS) to subsequently deconvolute ST capture locations (spots).
Simulating varying reference quantities and qualities, we confirmed high prediction accuracy also with shallowly sequenced or small-sized scRNA-seq reference datasets. SPOTlight deconvolution of the mouse brain correctly mapped subtle neuronal cell states of the cortical layers and the defined architecture of the hippocampus. In human pancreatic cancer, we successfully segmented patient sections and further fine-mapped normal and neoplastic cell states.
Trained on an external single-cell pancreatic tumor references, we further charted the localization of clinical-relevant and tumor-specific immune cell states, an illustrative example of its flexible application spectrum and future potential in digital pathology.
Doublets are a characteristic error source in droplet-based single-cell sequencing data where two cells are encapsulated in the same oil emulsion and are tagged with the same cell barcode. Across type doublets manifest as fictitious phenotypes that can be incorrectly interpreted as novel cell types. DoubletDetection present a novel, fast, unsupervised classifier to detect across-type doublets in single-cell RNA-sequencing data that operates on a count matrix and imposes no experimental constraints.
This classifier leverages the creation of in silico synthetic doublets to determine which cells in the
input count matrix have gene expression that is best explained by the combination of distinct cell
types in the matrix.
In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow for detecting doublets in single-cell RNA-seq count matrices.
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.
WGCNA: an R package for Weighted Gene Correlation Network Analysis
Correlation networks are increasingly being used in bioinformatics applications. For example, weighted gene co-expression network analysis is a systems biology method for describing the correlation patterns among genes across microarray samples. Weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) can be used for:
- Finding clusters (modules) of highly correlated genes
- Summarizing such clusters using the module eigengene or an intramodular hub gene
- Relating modules to one another and to external sample traits (using eigengene network methodology)
- For calculating module membership measures
All of these are important for identifying potential candidate genes associated with measured traits as well as identifying genes that are consistently co-expressed and could be contributing to similar molecular pathways. Using WGCNA is also extremely useful statistically as it accounts for inter-individual variation in gene expression and alleviates issues associated with multiple testing.