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Spatial transcriptomic studies are becoming increasingly common and large, posing important statistical and computational challenges for many analytic tasks. Here, we present SPARK-X, a non-parametric method for rapid and effective detection of spatially expressed genes in large spatial transcriptomic studies.
SPARK-X not only produces effective type I error control and high power but also brings orders of magnitude computational savings. We apply SPARK-X to analyze three large datasets, one of which is only analyzable by SPARK-X. In these data, SPARK-X identifies many spatially expressed genes including those that are spatially expressed within the same cell type, revealing new biological insights.
BioTuring
The recent development of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology has enabled us to infer cell-type-specific co-expression networks, enhancing our understanding of cell-type-specific biological functions. However, existing methods proposed for this task still face challenges due to unique characteristics in scRNA-seq data, such as high sequencing depth variations across cells and measurement errors.
CS-CORE (Su, C., Xu, Z., Shan, X. et al., 2023), an R package for cell-type-specific co-expression inference, explicitly models sequencing depth variations and measurement errors in scRNA-seq data.
In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow of CS-CORE using a dataset of Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (PBMC) from COVID patients and healthy controls (Wilk et al., 2020). The notebook content is inspired by CS-CORE's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.
BioTuring
Tumors are complex tissues of cancerous cells surrounded by a heterogeneous cellular microenvironment with which they interact. Single-cell sequencing enables molecular characterization of single cells within the tumor. However, cell annotation—the assignment of cell type or cell state to each sequenced cell—is a challenge, especially identifying tumor cells within single-cell or spatial sequencing experiments.
Here, we propose ikarus, a machine learning pipeline aimed at distinguishing tumor cells from normal cells at the single-cell level. We test ikarus on multiple single-cell datasets, showing that it achieves high sensitivity and specificity in multiple experimental contexts.
**InferCNV** is a Bayesian method, which agglomerates the expression signal of genomically adjointed genes to ascertain whether there is a gain or loss of a certain larger genomic segment. We have used **inferCNV** to call copy number variations in all samples used in the manuscript.
BioTuring
Single-cell RNA data allows cell-cell communications (***CCC***) methods to infer CCC at either the individual cell or cell cluster/cell type level, but physical distances between cells are not preserved Almet, Axel A., et al., (2021). On the other hand, spatial data provides spatial distances between cells, but single-cell or gene resolution is potentially lost. Therefore, integrating two types of data in a proper manner can complement their strengths and limitations, from that improve CCC analysis.
In this pipeline, we analyze CCC on Visium data with single-cell data as a reference. The pipeline includes 4 sub-notebooks as following
01-deconvolution: This step involves deconvolution and cell type annotation for Visium data, with cell type information obtained from a relevant single-cell dataset. The deconvolution method is SpatialDWLS which is integrated in Giotto package.
02-giotto: performs spatial based CCC and expression based CCC on Visium data using Giotto method.
03-nichenet: performs spatial based CCC and expression based CCC on Visium data using NicheNet method.
04-visualization: visualizes CCC results obtained from Giotto and NicheNet.
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BioTuring
Single-cell sequencing is an increasingly used technology and has promising applications in basic research and clinical translations. However, genotyping methods developed for bulk sequencing data have not been well adapted for single-cell data. In this notebook, we introduce cellSNP-lite for genotyping in single-cell sequencing data for both droplet and well-based platforms.
Cellsnp-lite is a C/C++ tool for efficient genotyping bi-allelic SNPs on single cells. You can use cellsnp-lite after read alignment to obtain the snp x cell pileup UMI or read count matrices for each alleles of given or detected SNPs.
cellSNP-lite aims to pileup the expressed alleles in single-cell or bulk RNA-seq data, which can be directly used for donor deconvolution in multiplexed single-cell RNA-seq data, particularly with vireo, which assigns cells to donors and detects doublets, even without genotyping reference.
Cellsnp-lite has following features:
- Wide applicability: cellsnp-lite can take data from various omics as input, including RNA-seq, DNA-seq, ATAC-seq, either in bulk or single cells.
- Simplified user interface that supports parallel computing, cell barcode and UMI tags.
- High efficiency in terms of running speed and memory usage with highly concordant results compared to existing methods.