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BioTuring
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) technology has allowed to capture of topographical gene expression profiling of tumor tissues, but single-cell resolution is potentially lost. Identifying cell identities in ST datasets from tumors or other samples remains challenging for existing cell-type deconvolution methods.
Spatial Cellular Estimator for Tumors (SpaCET) is an R package for analyzing cancer ST datasets to estimate cell lineages and intercellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment. Generally, SpaCET infers the malignant cell fraction through a gene pattern dictionary, then calibrates local cell densities and determines immune and stromal cell lineage fractions using a constrained regression model. Finally, the method can reveal putative cell-cell interactions in the tumor microenvironment.
In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow for cell type deconvolution and interaction analysis on breast cancer ST data from 10X Visium. The notebook is inspired by SpaCET's vignettes 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
Computational methods that model how the gene expression of a cell is influenced by interacting cells are lacking.
We present NicheNet, a method that predicts ligand–target links between interacting cells by combining their expression data with prior knowledge of signaling and gene regulatory networks.
We applied NicheNet to the tumor and immune cell microenvironment data and demonstrated that NicheNet can infer active ligands and their gene regulatory effects on interacting cells.
BioTuring
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.
Trends
BioTuring
scGen is a generative model to predict single-cell perturbation response across cell types, studies and species (Nature Methods, 2019). scGen is implemented using the scvi-tools framework.
What you can do with scGen:
Train on a dataset with multiple cell types and conditions and predict the perturbation effect on the cell type which you only have in one condition. This scenario can be extended to multiple species where you want to predict the effect of a specific species using another or all the species.
Train on a dataset where you have two conditions (e.g. control and perturbed) and predict on second dataset with similar genes.
Remove batch effect on labeled data. In this scenario you need to provide cell_type and batch labels to the method. Note that batch_removal does not require all cell types to be present in all datasets (batches). If you have dataset specific cell type it will preserved as before.
We assume there exist two conditions in you dataset (e.g. control and perturbed). You can train the model and with your data and predict the perturbation for the cell type/species of interest.
We recommend to use normalized data for the training. A simple example for normalization can be performed using scanpy