Mapping out the coarse-grained connectivity structures of complex manifolds
Biological systems often change over time, as old cells die and new cells are created through differentiation from progenitor cells. This means that at any given time, not all cells will be at the same stage of development. In this sense, a single-cell sample could contain cells at different stages of differentiation. By analyzing the data, we can identify which cells are at which stages and build a model for their biological transitions.
By quantifying the connectivity of partitions (groups, clusters) of the single-cell graph, partition-based graph abstraction (PAGA) generates a much simpler abstracted graph (PAGA graph) of partitions, in which edge weights represent confidence in the presence of connections.
In this notebook, we will introduce the concept of single-cell Trajectory Analysis using PAGA (Partition-based graph abstraction) in the context of hematopoietic differentiation.
PopV uses popular vote of a variety of cell-type transfer tools to classify cell-types in a query dataset based on a test dataset.
Using this variety of algorithms, they compute the agreement between those algorithms and use this agreement to predict which cell-types have a high likelihood of the same cell-types observed in the reference.
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.
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.
Monorail can be used to process local and/or private data, allowing results to be directly compared to any study in recount3. Taken together, Monorail-pipeline tools help biologists maximize the utility of publicly available RNA-seq data, especially to improve their understanding of newly collected data.
This is for helping potential users of the Monorail RNA-seq processing pipeline (alignment/quantification) get started running their own data through it.